Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal

PABLO ALBARENGA

The tour bus was standing by to take the workers down the highway at 1 a.m., arriving in the nearest city, Três Lagoas, by 3 a.m. to pick up the next shift. “You don’t do this work without a few birds at home to feed,” a driver remarked as he watched his colleagues filling holes in the field by the light of their headlamps. After getting permission from his boss, he drove us an hour each way to town to the nearest gas station.

This highway through the Cellulose Valley has become known as a road of opportunity, with eucalyptus as the region’s new lifeblood after the cattle industry shrank its footprint. Not far from the new Suzano factory, a popular roadside attraction is an oversize sculpture of a black bull at the gates of a well-known ranch. The ranch was recently planted, and the bull is now guarded by a phalanx of eucalyptus. 

On TikTok, workers post selfies and views from tractors in the nearby groves, backed by a song from the local country music duo Jads e Jadson. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a down-on-his-luck man at risk of losing his fiancée. Later, when he cuts down the trees and becomes a wealthy man with better options, he cuts off his betrothed, too. 

The race to plant more eucalyptus here is backed heavily by the state government, which last year waived environmental requirements for new farms on pasture and hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years. The trees were an important component of Brazil’s plan to meet its global climate commitments, and the timber industry was keen to cash in. Companies like Suzano have already proposed that tens of thousands of their hectares become eligible for carbon credits. 

What’s top of mind for everyone, though, is worsening fires. Even when we visited in midwinter, the weather was hot and dry. The wider region was in a deep drought, perhaps the worst in 700 years, and in a few weeks, one of the worst fire seasons ever would begin. Suzano would be forced to make a rare pause in its planting when soil temperatures reached 154 °F. 

Posted along the highway are constant reminders of the coming danger: signs, emblazoned with the logos of a dozen timber companies, that read “FOGO ZERO,” or “ZERO FIRE.” 

PABLO ALBARENGA

In other places struck by megafires, like Portugal and Chile, eucalyptus has been blamed for worsening the flames. (The Chilean government has recently excluded pine and eucalyptus farms from its climate plans.) But here in Brazil, where climate change is already supersizing the blazes, the industry offers sophisticated systems to detect and suppress fires, argued Calmon of Conservation International. “You really need to protect it because that’s your asset,” he said. (BTG also noted that in parts of the Cerrado where human activity has increased, fires have decreased.) 

Eucalyptus is often portrayed as impossibly thirsty compared with other trees, but Calmon pointed out it is not uniquely so. In some parts of the Cerrado, it has been found to consume four times as much water as native vegetation; in others, the two landscapes have been roughly in line. It depends on many factors—what type of soil it’s planted in, what Cerrado vegetation coexists with it, how intensely the eucalyptus is farmed. Timber companies, which have no interest in seeing their own plantations run dry, invest heavily in managing water. Another hope, Wishnie told me, is that by vastly increasing the forest canopy, the new eucalyptus will actually gather moisture and help produce rain.