Implementing crop rotation and revitalizing pasture instead of chopping down the rainforest and planting new grasslands may help turn farming from the Amazon’s biggest killer to its best defender.
 

Researcher Flavio Wruck spends his time trying to convince farmers and ranchers that by diversifying and renewing nutrients in the soil, will enable them to farm he same tract of land for several generations and earn more money.

In the Amazon the practice has been to raze a patch of jungle, plant pasture and graze cattle and move on once the land is exhausted and rip up a fresh patch of virgin forest.
 

At the government-run experimental farm where he works, Wruck points toward plots where crops, cattle and timber live together.
 

"Our integration system rapidly increases the efficiency of crop and pasture land, allowing, for example, ranchers to graze as much as five times more cattle on the same piece of ground," Wruck said during a recent visit to the 1,850-acre Fazenda Gramada farm run by Brazil's agricultural research agency Embrapa.

"That means we can break the cycle of ranchers needing to deforest to create more pasture."
 

Brazilian officials and environmentalists agree, cattle ranching is the biggest cause of deforestation of the nation's Amazon, and has already destroyed around 20 per cent of an area the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River.
 

The rainforest may be the world's best defense against climate change because it absorbs the carbon dioxide blamed for global warming. But the gains are offset by burned or rotted vegetation that releases about 75 percent of Brazil's carbon emissions.
 

The introduction of different farm methods and a change in government policy has shown the biggest annual drop in deforestation since the government began keeping records about 20 years ago, officials said.

(AP contributed to this report)