At the end of 2004, Leontino Balbo Junior, executive vice-president of the Balbo Group, Brazil’s biggest organic-sugar grower, gave over 100 hectares of the company’s land to a sugarcane variety called SP84-2025. Variety SP84-2025 had had a chequered history. Initially a robust and productive crop which had proved ideal for the fertile plains of São Paulo state, by the late 90s it had become susceptible to yellow-leaf virus, which had not only reduced its productivity but had also threatened to contaminate adjacent fields. Weakened and commercially useless, it was abandoned by the industry in 2003 and consigned to the scrapheap of crops gone bad.

Balbo chose SP84-2025 to make a point. Since 1986, he had been working on a new form of agriculture that he was convinced would increase a crop’s productivity, boost its resistance to pests, reduce the resources needed to cultivate it, and broaden the biodiversity of the land in which it was grown. He called his approach “ecosystem revitalising agriculture” (ERA) and claimed that it could revive not only ailing crops, such as SP84-2025, but also ailing land that had been “starved of vitality” by decades of modern farming. If it was successful, the impact would be felt far beyond agriculture. “My aim, since I started that work,” he explains in the low-key cluster of buildings that make up the Balbo Group’s admin centre in Ribeirão Preto, 350km north-west of São Paulo, “has been to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, a way to preserve the natural resources we need now — water, soil fertility, biodiversity and the atmosphere. Otherwise, we won’t be able to maintain a civilised society. If we have a water crisis, for example, we will end up having a global war because of natural resources. And human beings as a civilisation will be gone.”

It’s a Saturday, a few weeks before this year’s harvest is due to begin, and the Balbo offices are deserted. The company was founded in 1946, although the family has been in the sugar business since 1903, and its administrative buildings feel as though they are in a time warp. The chairman’s office is still kitted out in 70s executive style — a huge desk, deep leather sofa and plenty of heavy onyx ashtrays. Except for a carefully arranged display of organic consumer products, the boardroom could be that of any small- to medium-sized car-parts manufacturer in the West Midlands.

The hectares of green sugarcane fields stretching off in every direction through the windows give the place an eerie sense of being lost to the modern world.

In one sense, Balbo himself is also from another age. Now 52, he is fit and enthusiastic — he begins each day with a workout, limits his alcohol intake and is an accomplished water-skier. He has a full head of black hair, which he is quick to point out “is not dyed”, and fixes you with an intensity when he talks. He is at the helm of one of the most successful organic-sugar producers in the world and can talk the science of modern agriculture. But his real laboratory is nature itself and the annual cycle of sowing, reaping, clearing and sowing that has always been the farmer’s lot.

Sugarcane is harvested once a year, with the plants left in the ground to grow again, usually for up to six or seven harvests.

Before he began his experiment, SP84-2025 was producing about 98 tonnes of cane per hectare. After he began to apply the various tools of ERA to the crop. And something remarkable happened: cane that before had shown the unmistakable signs of yellow virus — leaves that were blemished with pale streaks — grew taller, stronger and furthermore remained pest-free. And its productivity soared, to 156 tonnes per hectare. In subsequent years, despite the arrival in Brazil of the orange-rust fungus, to which SP84-2025 had also proved highly susceptible, the cane delivered yields well above average and off the scale for a crop that had largely been declared moribund. “It was something that had never been seen in the industry before,” Balbo says.

ERA is organic in its approach but, for Balbo, it goes much further than simply not using artificial pesticides or fertiliser.

At its core is a respect for soil. Farming has tended to treat soil more as a receptacle for water and nutrients than as something that makes an active contribution to plant growth. “Soil is not just a container,” he says, “it’s also the content of the ecosystem. It holds the biodiversity, both living and mineral, that’s essential for life. If the soil loses this function, all other things are compromised.” According to Balbo, modern agriculture damages soil in three ways. Farm machinery compresses it, making it less able to hold water; fertilisers upset its natural chemical balance; and monocrops reduce its biodiversity, which he sees as essential for healthy plants. “So much soil used for agriculture is dead,” he says. “We need to revitalise it, to restore the energy of its ecosystem.”

To do this, Balbo set aside 16,000 hectares of the family plantation and began to change how it was farmed. First to go was the decades-old habit of crop burning. Since the early 20th century, many sugarcane producers have started fires in their fields before harvesting. Crop burning eliminates pests and snakes, and burns the “trash” — the living and dead leaves — from the canes, which makes them easier to cut. Balbo says the environmental downsides of this approach, however, are significant.

“After burning, the cane releases a sugar melt, like honey, which drops down into the soil. So the harvesters have to cut and collect not only the cane, but the melt, which is full of soil. This has to be washed at the mill — we were using three million litres of water every hour just to do that. Burning the trash denies you the opportunity to return it to the soil as mulch.”

As an alternative to crop burning, Balbo spent five years, from 1988 to 1993, developing a mechanical harvester that would cut the cane “green”, that is with its leaves still on. He built a machine that cut the cane into pieces and fed them into a hopper where opposing currents of air stripped off the leaves and sprayed them on to the recently cut ground. Harvesting in this way, Balbo says, returns 20 tonnes of trash per hectare to the soil each year, restoring nutrients, especially nitrogen, and forming a mulch that helps keep weeds down.

To address the problem of compression, Balbo turned his attention to the tyres used by the farm’s trucks. “Farm equipment is heavy,” he says, “and wherever you drive you compress the soil, changing its geometric structure and reducing its ability to hold water. We now have ultrasoft tyres that we partially deflate before driving into the fields to reduce the impact on the soil.”

At first, the results were not good. Production levels fell and pests increased. But, after five years, multiple layers of trash began to feed an increasing biodiversity of micro and macro fauna, and the canes grew stronger. What began as a hypothesis — that restoring biodiversity to the soil would lead to stronger plants — was starting to be proven.

Balbo’s inspiration is rooted in his upbringing in the lush countryside of São Paulo state. “I would come home from school,” he says, “strip down to my shorts and ride my bike into the forest to go fishing. I would stand there in the pond, waist-high in water, with a fishing rod in one hand and a rock in the other, ready to fend off crocodiles. It was there where I first started to understand the complexity of the forest, a place where each living organism has a role, a function in helping the others grow.”

In 1980 he went to São Paulo State University to study agronomy. He was a conscientious student but was saddened, he says, by the number of his classmates who, after graduation, went to work for fertiliser companies rather than on the land. He decided to dedicate himself to increasing the vitality of the land he would farm, to returning its state as close as possible to that of the forest that surrounded it. “For me, the forest has always been my inspiration,” he says. “There, you see no monocrops. There, there are hundreds of organisms growing together. The toxins secreted by one plant are taken up and metabolised by another. I don’t like to use the word ‘balance’. That implies something static. Instead there is omeostasis, where the system regulates itself to the benefit of all the parts that grow in it. Trash from plants falls back down on to the ground, and the soil is a living ecosystem that nourishes everything that grows in it.”

A forest, though, is not a farm, and Balbo’s challenge was to find a way of replicating the self-sustaining ecosystem of uncultivated land, while still being able to harvest crops, an act which, in its very nature, removes nutrients and energy from the land. Returning trash to the fields as mulch went some way towards this, but he still needed another way of restoring nutrients to the soil and capturing the energy that the plants had absorbed from the Sun. He turned his attention to the byproducts of the sugar-production process itself.

At the estate’s mill in São Francisco (one of its three mills, the company has turned this one over to organic production) the liquid residue left over after the cane pulp is fermented is collected and sprayed back on to the fields, and dry matter is fed directly into a furnace, which produces 200 tonnes of steam per hour. Some of this is used to extract sugar from the cane. The rest of the electricity powers the mill and its associated buildings, with excess sold to the grid.

At the heart of Balbo’s approach is the principle that, if he can restore his soil to condition of that in the forest, nature will do the rest. But nature works slowly and, between 1992 and 2000, he had, he says, many sleepless nights and a lot of stress. “We weren’t getting good production figures and the environmental results took some time to return, because no one had done this before, I didn’t know exactly where the problem was — in the tyres or in the trash. It was difficult to understand what was linked to what in the environment.”

In 1991, the World Bank commissioned the Copersucar Technology Centre, part of a large co-operative to which Balbo belonged, to carry out independent tests on Balbo’s fields over five years. The aim was to investigate the possibility of using trash to produce electricity, but Balbo agreed on the basis that the researchers would bring a scientific eye to his new agricultural techniques. “I had a sense that I was doing the right thing,” he says, “but I needed outside verification.”