How can a three-year-old agroforestry company produce trustworthy, sustainable feedstock – raw materials for finished goods, energy, and more – while reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere?

“We do that by using the biodiversity of this region, the Cerrado in Brazil,” Francisco de Blanco, S.Oleum co-founder and CEO, told SAP at the company’s headquarters, an innovative farm just outside João Pinheiro.

Why the Brazilian outback? This tropical savanna is home to the macaúba, a highly adaptable oil-producing tree with a penchant for scrubbing harmful CO2 from the air. Macaúba fruit yields advanced vegetable oils (AVOs) and high-protein food – and it can be 15 times more productive than soybeans.

“We are restoring the landscape that was deforested…Macaúba was native here many, many years ago,” Felipe Morbi, S.Oleum co-founder and Agroforestry VP,  said. “Now we are bringing back these trees, and also all the other species, to restore this biodiversity.”

S.Oleum seeks to accomplish this scientifically, using macaúba and other crops in an integrated crop-livestock-forest approach, according to Morbi. The goal is to create working farms that rejuvenate degraded, low-yielding soil – and that sequester into the soil more carbon than they generate.