Cacao agroforestry: shade-grown cacao, EUDR, biodiversity credits

Shade-grown cacao as a #SexyTrees crop — stacking harvest income, biodiversity, and EUDR-ready traceability on a single hectare.

This is a bricolage protocol; which means we are building it in public! Some pages are under construction — but check back soon its updating fast!

We don't tell farmers what to plant in production crops. This is a personal decision, and we respect farmers and their lived experience. Our team does research on markets, talks to international buyers to see how to get higher prices, aims for organic production, and parses and screens technical information for practicality. We encourage farmers toward polyculture, and provide grassroots peer and academic technical advisors in direct consultations to help them find good technical information for their zone.

Figure C. Cacao cultivation in Putumayo smallfarmers

Don Ramiro on his high quality cacao agroforestry plot in Villagarzón, Putumayo — deep-maroon pods ripening among the leaf litter.

Post-harvest — fermented cacao beans drying in the sun, Villagarzón, Putumayo. The step between pod and chocolate, and where smallholder value is won or lost.

A pigmented native cacao variety in heavy fruit on a young tree, Villagarzón, Putumayo — pods and flowers borne straight on the stem.

Non-native grafted ripening cacao (Theobroma cacao) on a Savimbo producer's shade-grown plot in Villagarzón, Putumayo — pods straight off the trunk (cauliflory).

Fermented, dried cacao beans ready for market, Villagarzón, Putumayo — the commodity grade that EUDR traceability now rides on.

A woman cacao farmer holds out an opened yellow pod showing white pulp and fresh beans, Putumayo, Colombia.

Get good practical information for cacao

This is a brief practice guide on cacao planting, which is not intended to be comprehensive. In Spanish, we strongly recommend the CGIR-funded, Bioversity/CIAT-authored practice guide Manual de renovación de copa de cacao. Lecciones aprendidas del cacao Blanco de Piura y Chuncho de Cusco. Download below, and for the science Cacao Diversity website.

10MB

Cacao manual.pdf

PDF

Open

Both were authored by Evert Thomas' team, which has been an invaluable and much-appreciated resource for our grassroots team in applying top-notch science to smallfarming collectives.

Inga and cacao polyculture

All of our cacao plots are planted with Inga and often with other food crops. The major consideration here is the proper balance of shade. As nerdy as we can get about the dimensions, farmers make better decisions from first principles.

• Sun and shade. "For best results, the planting design has to find the best ratio between alley width and tree height, so that crops have enough light and trees do not over-shade them. The proper design varies with the site and is generally tested locally."(Florencia Montagnini, pers. comm. June 12, 2026). By report, cacao can be grown in Inga alleys that are aggressively pollarded, but most production sites prefer to grow in a tresbollilo, banded, or grid planting system (Jose Ramirez, pers. comm. June 10, 2026).
• Root spacing. Inga can be aggressively pollarded to reduce shade at the branches, but the root system is also important and intertwines (Leblanc 2013). Both species pile feeder roots into the top ~15cm of soil. Also, ideal cacao root systems vary by geography, for instance, 3x3m spacing in Peru, but 4.5x4.5 in Putumayo. We use the Bioversity/CIAT agroforestry tool for calculating spacing by geocode (Evert Thomas, pers. comm, Jun 28, 2026).

By word of mouth from Jose Ramirez in Ecuador, Inga produces a higher quality cacao taste as well, although to our knowledge this has not been researched (Jose Ramirez, pers. comm. June 10, 2026).

We always cultivate our caco seedlings with love, bokachi, and biochar. And use mobile seedling nurseries run by local matriach circles.

Roots first = savagely wild seeds

Cacao is definitely a free-love plant and extensively cross-pollinates. So it's practically impossible to know which exact strain you're getting for fruit. For cultivating seedlings, we find the wildest, most savage, thriving cacao trees we can in our zone. (Like a crossbreed alley dog.) This means the roots are likely to be resistant to local pathogens and take hold well in the soil.

To be clear, we are not selecting for fruit when we collect the seeds; we are selecting for strong roots and tough happy trees.

Grafts second = equisitely delicate injections

Then, after the trees are old enough, we "beg, borrow, or steal" grafts to splice in higher-grade production crops. That's when we select for fruit, and get the best tasting, highest quality production fruit we can find. These are selected by word of mouth, importer buying circles, and nerdy chocolatiers regionally. The Caco Diversity website catalog helps us see which fruits will grow best in our zone.

Figure M. Cacao grafting information from Bioversity/CIAT farmers' manual