Innovation and Disruption at the PRETATERRA Exponential Lab
Translated from Portuguese. Original published by PRETATERRA.
Technology & ancestral knowledge
For thousands of years agroforestry has been practiced empirically by ancestral peoples. Today, with nearly 8 billion people in the world, we need to rethink how we produce food on our planet. Monoculture and environmental degradation have brought impacts such as climate change and soil degradation, which now put us in front of a possible food crisis never seen before. Old agroforestry solutions alone would not be able to solve all the challenges we face today unless we bring technology and ancestral knowledge together. That is the heart and the wisdom PRETATERRA offers humanity today.
We are open to every existing technology and to those yet to be created. We will not bring about a revolution in regenerative agroforestry farming on this planet unless we are aligned and hand in hand with all the sciences available. That is why, with every new challenge, partner, client and biome, we constantly improve. PRETATERRA is, in itself, a permanent R&D area.
Our main fronts for the exponential development of regenerative technology today are based on:
New ways of learning
Using digital technologies to bring agroforestry to everyone, everywhere.
Innovative field practices
In our open-air R&D at the PRETATERRA Farm in Timburi, São Paulo, we innovate and prototype different concepts and ways of farming in harmony with planet Earth.
Agroforestry carbon
Unlike the way carbon is extrapolated today, PRETATERRA developed a method to calculate carbon individually for each element of the system, allowing much more accurate forecasts for agroforestry systems and an understanding of how carbon generation and optimization will perform throughout the system's life cycle, including management practices, pruning, soil carbon and nutrient cycling in leaf litter. This way we can contribute more actively to reducing the impacts of climate change, not only by sequestering carbon but by introducing management practices that help create a microclimate that reduces climate impacts and benefits farmers of all sizes.
Smart cities
We also bring our large-scale agroforestry logic to small and micro scales, using technology to produce food in integrated indoor systems, green roofs, vertical walls and other production systems such as aquaculture and aquaponics, within smart cities.
Aerospace technology and landscape planning
We use cutting-edge drone and GIS technology and readings from different spectra, such as NDVI and LiDAR, to create highly accurate mosaics covering soil, climate, slope, biomass and photosynthetic potential, in order to design the best agroforestry systems ever seen.
Software and modeling
One of our main fronts of technological disruption is building software with a friendly interface, usable by everyone from smallholders to large companies, to design and manage biodiverse agroforestry systems, understanding their ecological, economic and environmental dimensions in all the most important aspects, including social plugins for integrating communities and other native peoples.
