In Ten Years, He Gave His Eighty-Hectare Farm Back to the Forest

In the northern lowlands of Costa Rica, the Montero family's cattle ranch has passed down three generations. At its height, two hundred cattle roamed eighty hectares of pasture that reached to the horizon — and so did the fences.

Montero is fifty-eight now, the last cattleman of the line. For a decade the signs had been getting harder to ignore: the pasture degrading, the cattle thinner each year, and every rainy season the red earth washing into the river until the water ran the color of milky tea. Beef prices rose and fell, and his son, working as a cook in San José, urged him to sell the land.

The change came out of an old photo album. One rainy season, leafing through his grandfather's album, Montero found a yellowed photograph: the same river, running green and clear, its banks canopied by trees that seemed to hold up the sky. On the back, in his grandfather's hand: "What the forest left us is worth more than the pen."

He remembered being a child, and his grandfather pointing at the last big trees on the ranch's edge: "The cattle came later. First came the trees, and everything that lives under trees."

The next year Montero did something that stunned the village: he sold all but six of his cattle, took down half the fences, and began to plant trees. For five full years the neighbors' nickname for him was Crazy Montero.

Giving land back to forest is not as simple as sticking saplings in the ground. The first two years were the hardest: elephant grass raced over the young trees, and he rose at four to cut it back; in the dry season whole rows of seedlings died, and he learned to dig water-catching ditches along the contours. He dismantled the cattle pen and built its lumber into shading frames for a nursery, raising his first native species — guanacaste, cedar, the red tree known as "the sergeant." He planted by a homespun rule: never in rows, but in communities. Tall trees, short trees, fruit-bearers, nitrogen-fixers, mixed together. "A forest isn't an army," he said. "It's a market. The stalls have to be arranged right."

In the third year the first toucan came back. Montero stood on a field ridge for half an hour watching it hammer away at a fruit. In the fifth year, the stream no longer ran dry in the drought months. In the seventh, a trail camera caught an ocelot. What finally moved him to tears came in the tenth year: a camera set by the stream, at two in the morning, photographed a jaguar — a female, with a cub.

A biologist told him what his trees had done. His farm sits between two national parks, a stamp pressed into the middle of a broken corridor — and the forest he had replanted had joined the two sides back together. One more link of the jaguar corridor, complete.

"It took me thirty years to learn to cut down trees," Montero says, "and ten years to learn to wait."

The farm now earns steadier money than the cattle ever did. He grows coffee under the canopy — shade-grown beans ripen slowly and taste better, and European buyers pay specialty prices. Beehives in the woods yield two harvests of honey a year. The last six cattle are retired; the lead animal, called El Presidente, spends his days loitering by the nursery as an honorary guard, his bell scattering the monkeys. The son quit his job and came home to run the coffee and the online shop; a video of his jaguar footage has been watched millions of times, and the most-liked comment reads: "So this is the sound of a forest coming back — footsteps like these."

Montero doesn't use the internet much. But he likes to walk the farm at dusk, counting the birds. He keeps a little notebook. The first page, dated 2009, reads: birds, 4 species. The latest page, last month: 117 species, plus two he couldn't name and means to go ask about.

The forest doesn't need an apology. It needs an open door. Leave the door open, leave the seeds behind, and the rest of the way home, it will walk by itself.

Nobody in the village calls him Crazy Montero anymore. Two years ago, three neighbors came asking for saplings; last year, seven. Montero's nursery doesn't sell its trees — it has one condition: whoever takes saplings must set aside a piece of "still ground" on their own land — untouched, not a blade of grass disturbed, for ten years. On the edge of every such plot he helps plant a cedar. He calls it "signing the forest's guest book."

Asked about his plans for the future, Montero points deep into the former pasture, where a flock of green parrots is flying over the canopy, shrieking. "The future?" He laughs. "The future isn't mine to plan anymore. It's theirs."