{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Dr Kumar Discovery","title":"Protect the Rainforest, Support Farmers, & Fuel Your Body | Acai | Travis Baumgardner","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3555,"description":"Clear-cut a patch of rainforest and plant açaí in neat rows, and you'd expect more fruit per acre. You get less. Thirty years on the ground, plus a stack of studies, point the same way: açaí managed in the wild agroforestry system outproduces the monoculture that would replace it. And the fruit itself breaks the rules too. Açaí has no sugar in it at all, it's one of the only fruits built around fat instead.\nTravis Baumgardner co-founded Sambazon, now serving as its Chief Impact Officer, after a 1995 trip to Brazil that was supposed to last three weeks. He ended up in Rio with zero Portuguese, studying environmental geography at a Catholic university, until a question from his ecology professor about the açaí bowl in his hand sent him on an overnight riverboat into the Amazon estuary. He partnered with Ryan Black, Sambazon's CEO, and has spent three decades since building the supply chain on the ground.\nTravis was a California kid headed to carnival in Olinda for what he thought was a three week vacation. Three months later he was living in Rio, then enrolled in a Catholic university studying environmental geography. The turn came in his senior year, when his ecology professor pointed at the açaí bowl in his hand and asked if he knew where it actually came from. He didn't. That question sent him on an overnight riverboat to Marajó Island, an island the size of Switzerland sitting in the Amazon estuary with no roads. He expected a plantation. What he found instead was a tidal, flooded forest tended by riverside families called ribeirinhos, a biodiverse system that wasn't built on clearing anything.\nThat system turns out to out-produce the alternative. Travis says his own thirty years of observation, backed by several studies, show that açaí planted in cleared monoculture yields less fruit per hectare than palms left standing in managed agroforestry, partly because the wild pollinators are still there. It's the same logic behind Sambazon's supply chain: cut out the...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/1b0HAhl7LyS1JMvttJBUPVo13Xhw89dNIYFNVWa7Un0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83NGVi/ODc5ZmE2MTI0Njdj/NWRjODE2NTkzNTQ0/ZjY0Yi5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}