Planet Organic paid a visit to the São Francisco Sugar Mill. Leontino Balbo Jr., its agricultural-director, showed us personally the organically cultivated sugar-cane plantation, proving the viability of a large scale organic production. Here is the account of the first part of the visit.

São Francisco Sugar Mill, located in Sertãozinho, distant 30 minutes from Ribeirão Preto, State of São Paulo, is the world’s largest organic sugar mill,. Although this sounds like a boastful statement, after visiting its installations, the farms, the bio-diversity islands, the laboratory and especially the social aspects of this project, Planet Organic is convinced to have visited the world’s largest organic sugar mill. Here we invite you to share this meeting with Leontino Balbo Jr., its agricultural-director, who talks about his roots and his experiences in the organic world..  

Since when does your family deals with agriculture?
My great-grandparents came from Italy and my grandfather was born here. When he was 9 years old he started to work at the Schmidt Sugar Mill, which belonged to Francisco Schmidt, called at the time "the king of coffee". My grandfather got married here and had 12 children; 4 women and 8 men. They all worked; the women began by laundering clothes then started a boarding-house, which allowed them to send the three younger sons to school. One took agronomy at Luis de Queiroz University, in Piracicaba, and the other two chose odontology. My father is a dentist, but has always worked in the field, in sugar plants. They didn’t consider Saturdays, Sundays or holidays. They lived for work. I had uncles who took their first vacations when they were 45 to 48 years old. My uncles were very creative, even without having attended school. My uncle Alcidio built machines, and created the first fertilizing machine for sugar cane made in Brazil. He was then 17. This machine is being used to this day. He died four years ago at 74. We still have this fertilizing machine, with 70 years of use, and nobody has ever built a better one. In 1947, they took their 40 years savings, bought a small piece of land and started business at the Santo Antônio Sugar Mill, and in 1957 founded the São Francisco Sugar Mill. 
With the Usina da Pedra (Stone Sugar Mill) together they started to render industrial services: cultural residues like the folhiço, the bagasse and the vinhaça, which is a bad wine, considered at first to be a polluting agent that was thrown out in the rivers, but that later has proven to be an excellent organic fertilizer. They started using them even before Copersucar experimented with them. Besides being inventive, they were very concerned with order and cleanliness. My father would roam the 10 thousand hectares, and if he found a crooked fence, that would have to be fixed immediately. The wires had to be sharp, the alleys swept.They have created a philosophy of quality.

And when did you get involved with the family’s link to the earth?
When I came here in 1984 I had a cousin, Jairo, who was an agronomist working in the industrial area. One of my brothers came in 1983. When we arrived we noticed that, even with all the organization, the sugar cane was burned and cut manually, which was a tiring, hard work. A burnt sugar cane suffers micro-fissures in its rind. It lets out a sugary liquid, then the water evaporates and a syrup is formed around the burnt rind. In a conventional sugar mill, when the sugar cane touches the earth, the earth sticks to it and creates a crust and that’s how it would go from the field to the mill. We couldn’t accept that. We thought we had to improve the process. By this time we started a program called Projeto Cana Verde (Green Sugar Cane Project), which consisted in creating an agricultural area that would reach self-sustainability in order to improve the quality of the raw material. That was in 1986.

Since we’re talking about agriculture, what was the first "seed" that propelled the strong germination of this project?
The first thing we thought should be done without the use of great technology was the implementation of a reforestation project, so we could start creating islands of bio-diversity. If we wanted to reach self-sustainability we would need nature’s help. As you lay off modern supplies, especially chemicals, you need biological supplies. Then you have to plan ahead, for some of the project’s steps can be implemented in 1, 2, 3 and 4 years, but reforesting, even if you plant everything at once, only gives results after 30 years. In our case, we made a kind of organic fertilizing and are getting groves and forests in 12 to 14 years. Half of the time of a conventional reforestation.

How many organic hectares do you have today?
The two mills, São Francisco and Santo Antonio have a total area of 20,000 hectares, of which 13,000 are organic. In order to convert even more to organic we are developing a specific technology. The problem is that we also depend on the market. We have today organic sugar cane to produce 80,000 tons of organic sugar and we export 20,000 tons. We need a breather. There is all the organic status to maintain, at higher costs. The manual harvesting and organic fertilizing makes it all more expensive. When we plant the sugar cane today, we place 200 tons of organic fertilizer by hectare. The conventional planting uses 500 tons of chemical products. We place 400 times more volume in organic form. This has a much higher cost.

It may have a higher cost, but the environmental advantages are countless...
No doubt about it!  When I sell organic sugar I’m selling a healthier product and also the "non-impact" in the area of production environment, I’m selling the concern with the river, with the drinking water, with the bird, with the climate...Since we started the Green Sugar Cane Project the São Francisco Sugar Mill had 5% of an area of native vegetation; today we have 14%. In an organic project, the soil and the forest are not aware that lands have deeds, what matters is the interaction of these areas of continuity. The program of reforestation of native trees began its implementation in 1986, in order to create islands of diversity ("biologic deposits") of natural resources that contribute to the balance of the local ecosystem. The mills keep nurseries which are able to produce 65,000 cuttings of native species a year. They are planted in the farms according with their qualities and the needs of each area, such as river banks, lakes and meadows, areas considered as good for the breeding of fish, birds and mammals. Around 800,000 trees have been planted since the beginning of the program and the early planting areas are already filled with forests. Our goal for next year is to have 1 million trees planted. With reforestation, wild animals have come back to the farms and the food chain has been gradually reestablished. Correspondingly, a work of protection of wild life forbids hunting and fishing and establishes a program of prevention and combat to fires in the areas that have been reforested and that has native vegetation., with constant patrolling and access restriction to habitats. So, in 1986 we did the reforestation and then the most difficult stage began...

And what would that be?
To avoid the burning of the sugar cane. It was hard to adapt the machines: two of them caught fire, others collected too much straw and finally we had to contact the makers of the machines so that they could make the necessary adaptations so that we could harvest the green sugar cane. We wanted the green sugar cane, not the burnt one. We had to start a joint collaboration with designers and mechanics in order to remodel the hydraulic system, which was done in São Paulo. It took us 5 years to develop a machine that worked satisfactorily, until the appearance of the "Amazon" in 1993 and the two other models that came afterwards. Even Australia sent us a machine for testing. But in 1990 we had seen that machine swallow the sugar cane. We had two prototypes made. We had three kinds of machines running commercially, they were still not good, but we had to keep on going, there was no way back. Once having collected the raw sugar cane we wanted to continue to do it. On the first year we harvested 2% of sugar cane, on the second year 6% and then up to 18 and 24%. Until, in 1995, we completed 100% of the area.

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