La Ferme Moderne

La Ferme Moderne is a company that produces high-end artisanal gastronomic products. Previously dedicated to the production of ceramics, its farm is now recognized for its production of rare fruits with high market value. With this base already established, La Ferme Moderne invited PRETATERRA to bring its agroforestry expertise to the business model. We created a biodiverse and productive design that preserves the essence of La Ferme Moderne and adds the social, environmental and economic benefits of agroforestry.

Based in Avaré (SP), La Ferme Moderne defines itself as a “gastronomic farm”, specializing in healthy artisanal products, with high added value and with minimal industrial processing. This is a vision that converges with the possibilities of agroforestry, as it can go beyond basic agricultural products and offer inputs for haute cuisine.

We combined the entrepreneurial vocation of La Ferme Moderne with the ecological, biological and edaphoclimatic reality (relating to climate and soil) of the west of São Paulo to arrive at a project with a holistic approach that considers the main assets from an ecological, social and economic point of view.

“PRETATERRA managed to understand what we would like to create. And from that we discussed and made lists and lists of species that fit into our project and that have the profile of our company.” Mauricio Sales, co-founder of La Ferme Moderne.

The system was designed to create a productive mosaic, with the greatest possible diversity within a viable and economically sustainable logic. The focus is on specialty products, such as organic baskets and gifts, items such as jams, liqueurs, native fruit infusions, spices, appetizers and honey. It also focused on high-value wood, income-generating nut trees, coffee, native fruit trees, with high nutritional value and potential gastronomic use (rare and with possible imminent demand).

Among the highlights in the development of the design, which was enriched by input from the La Ferme Moderne team, is the process of analysis and selection of the most adapted species, with prioritization of plants from the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado. We carried out a study with rigorous technical analysis to define species such as pitanga, araçá, Rangpur lime and uvaia, and then segmented them into functional niches.

Species such as cotia nuts, ariá and carob were removed from the list due to the lack of a market and/or limited knowledge of how to manage them, a fact that demonstrates PRETATERRA's dedication to modeling commercially viable production. This basic agroforestry design was also developed to be reproduced and expanded in other areas of the farm, and, as it is elastic, each implementation can have a different composition of species and/or a different flagship according to the priority and context. A variation of the system was also devised, a second design, with the inclusion of ideal space for agricultural crops aimed at the production of appetizers and preserves, as well as spices, aromatics and condiments.

The PRETATERRA project together with La Ferme Moderne contains robust financial modeling, based on production forecasts. It integrates the insertion of technical agricultural and agroforestry data, associated with productivity expectations within previously discussed premises, as well as micro and macroeconomic data.

Mauricio Sales also says: “ The most striking point of the project, we were always concerned about its economic viability but also the issue of biodiversity. We created a very complex system, with enough species to have an interesting cash flow.”

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PRETATERRA regenerative design aims to bring together ecological and economic factors in its resilience, diversity and operational systematization. All the premises used create an intelligent and diverse system, improving the intrinsic qualities of the soil and plants. Ultimately, the personalized regenerative agroforestry design conceived by PRETATERRA seeks to associate environmental and productive resilience, with market opportunity and the satisfaction of conscious consumers.