- In 2017, some residents of the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Governor’s Island spontaneously started tending a neglected garden that originated from a brief corporate event.
- Lacking ongoing governmental or corporate support, the initiative shifted toward agroforestry — a sustainable agroecology system where fruit trees, shrubs, medicinal plants and vegetables are grown in combination to benefit each other — inspiring a dozen more such projects across the island.
- These agroforests have reshaped the urban landscape and now attract an array of fauna, from birds to bees and even fireflies, drawn by the diversity of plant life thriving on improved soils.
- Perhaps most importantly, the agroforests offer free food and medicines to residents in need, plus shade and educational opportunities for the whole community, from schoolchildren to university students and residents.
RIO DE JANEIRO – I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at Cocotá. The large plaza, 11 hectares (27 acres) snatched from the sea by land reclamation more than five decades ago, was all too familiar. Everything in it was more or less as I remembered, from the skate tracks and sport courts to the concrete benches and walkways. Everything, save for the small, curious cluster of trees I’d come to visit, which looked more like a small forest than just another garden built by the city administration.
Cocotá is a neighborhood of Governor’s Island (or Ilha do Governador), a 39-square-kilometer (15-square-mile) island in the northeastern part of Rio de Janeiro. A large section of the island is occupied by the Brazilian Air Force and Rio’s international airport, leaving roughly half of its area to the more than 200,000 residents. Not long ago, I used to be one of them, which made the object of my visit all the more surprising: I would never expect an agroforest — where useful trees, shrubs and annual plants are grown together in a system that provides fruits, vegetables and habitat for animals — to take root here, in the middle of my city.
My hosts for the evening were enjoying the shade of the miniature “food forest,” as agroforestry plots are often called. Victor Huggo, a local architect, rose from his seat at the roots of a jambolan tree (Malabar plum, Syzygium cumini) to greet me. Across from him was Lucas Marques, a geography student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), who extended his hand. Both young men had lived on Governor’s Island for many years, and neither were people you’d expect to be tending an agroforestry plot in a public square. But this is the point of the whole initiative.
The Cocotá Agroforest was born of the will of a few community members, and for seven years it has been growing out of initially poor soil without any kind of governmental or corporate support, amid the concrete jungle of Brazil’s second largest city. This unusual idea is now spreading, too, inspiring more than a dozen other agroforests and agroecology-based gardens across the island, but its genesis is perhaps its most surprising aspect.
Vegetables and sunflower seeds
In 2017, TV Globo, Brazil’s largest media company, promoted an event on Governor’s Island seeking to integrate local artists and stimulate further cultural projects there. Dancers, musicians, yoga teachers, theater groups, martial artists and more gathered at Cocotá for the festival, and among the scheduled activities was the creation of a small community garden led by an organic farmer named Pedro Vettorazzo but handled by the community itself.
“I think I was passing by with my mother, and then we got involved and started digging,” says Paulo Randall, a local skateboarder who used to hang around the plaza. “The earth there was really, really hard.”
By the end of that day, lettuces, parsley, chives and kale were planted, but Globo’s involvement with the garden ended as soon as the festivities were over, leaving its fate in the hands of residents.
Randall was one of the first community members to start acting on behalf of the plot and add to it. Finding himself with a few too many germinated sunflower seeds at home — leftovers from a healthy diet — he decided to plant them in the garden.
The flowers took well to their new environment and started drawing the attention of community members, especially older folks. Seeing Randall taking daily care of the new, colorful garden, people started offering him more plants.
Soon, other locals, such as Victor Huggo (who goes by his compound name) and Marques also became involved with planting, pruning and watering. Their care followed no real method at first, however, and the poor, reclaimed soil of the plaza proved a barrier to their efforts.
But as they studied more and eventually came into contact with UFRJ students participating in agroecological projects at the university, a very specific kind of agriculture started to take shape.
An urban agroforest blooms
Agroforestry is an agroecology practice that integrates trees — often the fruit- or medicine-producing kind — with crops or livestock. It draws knowledge directly from forestry and ecological succession theory, which pays attention to how plant communities change over time; or, more to the point, how certain species, when colonizing a new area, transform local conditions in ways that allow other species to survive there.
In 2017, none of the people who now invited me into the heart of their community project knew exactly what an agroforest was or how they were supposed to function.
“As we worked, each of us studied individually,” remembers Victor Huggo. Slowly, they learned a bit more from books, movies, articles and from their own practice.
“The plot was like a school,” says Marques, who also had the opportunity to interact with agroforestry projects happening at UFRJ. “Much of our knowledge, and of our plants, came from the university.”
Now, seven years later, these self-taught agroforesters were educating me — someone who has dedicated more than a decade to ecological studies — on how to use chayas (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius), tree marigolds (Tithonia diversifolia) and pigeon peas (Cajanus cajan) as green manure. These plants help build up the organic matter and structure of the soil and also enrich it with nitrogen. Also, chopping down banana trees after they fruit is a technique that helps maintain local humidity, and adding other pruned plant matter to the mix helps enrich the soil for fruit trees.
Today, bananas, jambolan plums, Barbados cherries (Malpighia emarginata), lemon vines (Pereskia aculeata) and much more grow in an area of about 558 square meters (6,000 square feet). But even as its methods became more sophisticated, the initiative never abandoned its ideological roots.
Every community member is welcome to get their hands dirty, to learn how agroforestry works, and, perhaps most importantly, to benefit from what’s being produced. Anyone can help themselves to the food and medicinal plants in the plot, and throughout the year, people — particularly those in need — collect locally grown pigeon peas, avocados, graviolas and more.
“We see people coming here and consuming things on a daily basis,” Victor Huggo says.
Spreading roots
“Everything germinated here,” says Jefferson José Nogueira, locally known as Jack, referring to the Cocotá Agroforest as we walked from it to a Brazilian public emergency care unit (UPA) just 200 meters (600 feet) away, sited between the plaza and Guanabara Bay. He has been involved with the initiative since its early months and, around three years ago, took the lead in one of its many resulting outgrowths.
“When we started here, everything was overgrown with weeds,” he says. In 2021, he led an effort to start another agroforest right on UPA land about the same size as the original plot in Cocotá.
Looking around, it seemed incredible that it started only three years ago: bananas, passion fruits, papayas, guavas, achiote (Bixa orellana) and moringa (Moringa oleifera) were already growing well in the care center’s plot. Thanks to its easy access to freshwater via the center — a privilege the original forest didn’t have — the yard contains a vertical vegetable farm and a nursery. There are also chairs and a table by the bay so that UPA employees can enjoy their lunch breaks outside, surrounded by the sea and trees. Soon, when the yard has a bit more shade and a richer soil, Nogueira wants to plant cacao and jussara palms (Euterpe edulis).
As with the Cocotá plaza, Nogueira started planting in the UPA without any support, but recently, after a change in the care center’s administration, the new director fell in love with the initiative, hiring Nogueira to take care of it.
And now, two more agroforests — also “children” of the university and Cocotá initiatives — are being tended by a UPA worker in a different Governor’s Island neighborhood, called Ribeira. A long-time contributor to the agroecological initiative, Alexandre Henrique decided to replicate everything he learned from Cocotá in his own backyard there.
“There was a time in my life when things weren’t going so well, and I would come [to Cocotá] and eat Barbados cherries and lemon vine leaves from the garden, and I was able to get through the morning,” he says. The memory compelled him to start a new plot in an abandoned lot in front of his house.
“When we had our first pigeon pea plant [in Cocotá], we saw a family harvesting it, saying that it was what had fed them in northern Brazil,” he says. According to him, everyone should have access to food grown in the streets.
“I don’t harvest anything I grow in front of my house. I plant there so that people can learn to pass by, look and take what’s ripe,” Henrique says.
Other effects of these initiatives have also reached local schools. In 2019, at Sun Yat Sen, a public school located in the neighborhood of Tauá, the pedagogical coordinator Gabriela Sinhorelo started another agroforestry endeavor together with UFRJ students participating in Capim Limão, one of the university’s own agroecological projects. According to her, they “have been doing ecological literacy work.”
Over the last five years, the children have taken part in the creation of a hanging garden, an herb spiral, a small orchard and in the planting of different nonconventional food plants (so-called plantas alimentícias não convencionais, or PANCs). Sinhorelo says the plants have already ameliorated the heat in some parts of the school, but adds that agroecology has changed more than the local climate and landscape: It has changed the minds and perspectives of everyone taking part in the project.
Rewilding the urban landscape
Isabela Maciel is the only active member of the Cocotá initiative with formal academic ties, and she is trying to understand how bee diversity responds to changes in the urban landscape.
“We want to know how the landscape affects biodiversity in these agrosystems,” she says. Her master’s research mapped 18 different agroecological plots on Governor’s Island, mostly in schools and public spaces.
Maciel had become involved with the initiative in 2018, while still an undergrad. Her past work had looked into the relationship between bee and coffee plants in two other municipalities of Rio de Janeiro state, but her work on the island is still just beginning.
Her personal experience with the agroforest drove her scientific curiosity. “As we planted, we started seeing different bee species appearing along the years,” she says, and birds too. “When I started here, there weren’t many trees, so birds didn’t hang around much. But as the trees grew, [we] started seeing pionus parrots (Pionus sp.), waxbills (Estrilda astrild), fork-tailed flycatchers (Tyrannus savana) and more.”
Maciel isn’t alone in her observations. According to geography student Marques, especially throughout the first years of the Cocotá Agroforest, a succession of insect species followed the growing number of plants they cultivated.
“In the beginning, leafcutter ants dominate because they love degraded soil,” he says. “However, as the soil improves, the leafcutter ants can no longer survive, and new species of ants, including some carnivorous ones, start to appear.”
But ants weren’t the only newcomers. “When transforming a garden into an agroforestry system, you see different creatures appearing in cycles. There was a time when spiders, colorful grasshoppers, many birds and cicadas appeared. It’s fascinating to see this diversity and how each one contributes to the balance,” Marques says.
“The day fireflies appeared was truly magical, because it’s something very rare here in the city,” he says.
Similar experiences seem to come with every agroecological plot. During my short visit to the UPA clinic, Nogueira also mentioned that after the planted trees grew a bit, many birds started to visit the care center’s yard every morning. Bees are now frequent visitors too, and he took the opportunity to show me some of the traps Maciel had set up in the area. At Sun Yat Sen, according to teacher Sinhorelo, ladybugs are the stars of the show.
“In certain seasons, when the pigeon pea blooms, we have all kinds of bees and ladybugs,” she says. “It’s the most beautiful thing. The children walk around with ladybugs in their hands.”
Beyond Governor’s Island
Rio is a fairly green metropolis, having two of the largest urban forests in the world — Tijuca National Park and Pedra Branca State Park — and a good deal of smaller vegetated areas. That means that, despite all the concrete, the city still supports a somewhat rich bird and insect fauna, which can occupy more spaces like the agroforests, as they become inviting.
And Rio’s urban agroforestry is not limited to the island: Other agroforests are located on the UFRJ campus and in city neighborhoods such as Urca, Maracanã, Penha and others, mostly tended by students and others eager to make their city greener and improve food access for those who need it.
So, by the strength of these simple goals, even with incredibly limited resources, several small food forests thrive in the city.
As Nogueira put it as we were leaving the UPA, “When your relationship with the soil is not based on economic exploitation, you care for it in a very, very different way. You plant the things you truly want to see in the future, things you want your children and grandchildren to benefit from.”
View more features from Mongabay’s ongoing series on agroforestry here.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: The most climate-friendly and biodiversity-positive agriculture technique — agroforestry — is growing worldwide, listen here:
See a related feature about the urban ecology of Rio:
In Rio de Janeiro, a forest slowly returns to life, one species at a time
Citation:
Kempf, A. B. (2022). Agroflorestas urbanas como apropriação de espaços livres públicos da cidade: Um estudo de caso da Agrofloresta do Cocotá. Monography. Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
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