Luis Farfán was born in Puerto Maldonado into a family of farmers. His parents practiced conventional agriculture, growing rice, maize, and subsistence crops. Forest clearing, soil degradation, and low returns were part of the model. “I grew up inside agriculture,” Luis says, “but I hated it, I found it boring.” For him, farming felt disconnected from nature and offered little long-term promise.

While studying at the university, Luis began exploring alternative approaches to land use. Agroforestry caught his attention. For the first time, he saw the forest not as something to remove, but as a system to understand and emulate. “I started to love the forest in a different way.” That shift would shape his life’s work.

Luis is member of the Asociación de Agricultura Ecológica, a collective that has long promoted agroecological and agroforestry practices in Madre de Dios. Building on this collective work, several years later he founded EcoDely (Delicia Ecológica), a small processing enterprise that turns agroforestry harvests into shelf-stable foods. All EcoDely products come from agroforestry systems and are produced without preservatives or artificial flavorings. The processing plant allows products to reach the market with higher added value, strengthening incomes, and reinforcing the economic viability of agroforestry.

What has changed is not Luis’s vision, but its reach.

Through the support of the Wyss Academy for Nature, agroforestry systems implemented by members of the Asociación de Agricultura Ecológica, including those linked to EcoDely, are now supported with data through the Agroforestry Systems Incubator. The Wyss Academy has supported the installation of agroforestry research plots, helping translate decades of practice into measurable evidence.

For the first time in Madre de Dios, this work shows how much it costs to implement agroforestry systems, what they produce, and how they perform over time. The evidence connects production with data that can be shared with other farmers and with private and public institutions. This data reduces uncertainty for farmers who are hesitant and provides concrete inputs for planning, investment, and policy decisions in the public sector, thereby enabling broader uptake of agroforestry where it fits local conditions.

Today, the impact of this work reaches beyond Luis himself. His parents continue farming, but have begun integrating agroforestry systems into their own plots. He is also passing this relationship with the forest on to his children—teaching them how forest systems work and how food can be produced without depleting what sustains it. These shifts inside a family matter because they show how practice travels: through everyday decisions as well as through formal collaboration. In parallel, Luis’s engagement in the Hub SAM Agroforestry Systems Incubator, a multistakeholder platform supported by the Wyss Academy for Nature, connects lived experience with data—so agroforestry can be assessed, planned, and adopted with greater confidence across Tambopata and Madre de Dios.