Entrepreneur Marcello Guimarães, 53, always dreamed of working in the field. “As a child, in the 70s, my family lived in exile in Cuba for ten years. Part of my studies was at an agricultural school. There began my contact with the land and the dream of returning to it in the future,” he says. Fate had other plans, initially. For 35 years, Marcello was in the technology segment – he created Visual Kit 5 software, a Brazilian retail sales champion.
The desire to undertake in the countryside began to materialize in 2013, when he moved to Boa Vista (RR) for opportunities. “I set up a pig breeding business, but the closure of the state slaughterhouse closed down,” he says. It was there that the entrepreneur identified a new business opportunity: the African mahogany plantation, which finds in Roraima the ideal conditions of climate and soil to grow.
In 2015, in a small area gave, Mahogany Roraima was born, a startup that is committed to sustainable and certified planting of the species with ambitious plans: planting over the next ten years, mostly on third-party land, and the 1,000 hectares of this tree that produces one of the noblest apple trees in existence. in the world.
From 1971 to 1998, Brazil extracted the equivalent of 40,000 hectares of Brazilian mahogany. In 1998, a law prohibited the extraction of the species, which was on the verge of extinction. and can be replaced by African mahogany, “he says. By the end of 2019, Ma-hogany plans to plant 3,000 hectares of mahogany.
The business is funded through agricultural partnerships — the company obtains Forest Replacement Credits (CRF) from planting the seedlings and sells these titles to landowners who need to compensate for their dogma.
Timber extraction will take place in years, and property owners will keep some of the value produced. With nearly $ 3 million from angel investors, the startup is now aiming at attracting capital to lift the plan to raise the 1,000,000 acres of forests – which should require about $ 100 million. “In the future, when we begin to remove the wood, the expectation is annual turnover of $ 30 million”, he projects.
Original article here.
