Soleum acquires Acrotech and Soleá

Soleum - a company focused on the production of sustainable feedstocks with negative carbon emissions - has concluded the full acquisition of Acrotech and Soleá, two companies with more than 15 years’ experience dedicated to the research, development and domestication of the macaúba, a tree native to the Brazilian Cerrado, which is one of Soleum’s main focuses.

Founded in 2007, by the professor and researcher Sérgio Motoike, of the Federal University of Vi?osa (UFV), Acrotech developed the technology that can break the dormancy of the macaúba seed, thus allowing the production of pre-germinated seeds. “Acrotech has become the only company capable of producing macaúba seeds with good genetic quality, on a large scale, in Brazil,” says the researcher.

Previously, driven by the National Program for the Production and Use of Biodiesel (PNPB), Brazilian research was focused on discovering feedstocks with the potential to produce oil. The macaúba stood out as one of the most promising because, even before any sort of genetic improvement or management, it was already showing the capability to produce almost ten times more oil per hectare than soybean.

The great challenge with the macaúba, however, lay in the species’ germination rate, which in nature was very low, at 2%. But Motoike developed a technology that increased this percentage to 80%. “The initial idea for Acrotech was based on companies working on the genetic improvement of other species, which develop improved cultivars, producing and commercializing these seeds for the market,” he explains.

It was through Acrotech that Felipe Morbi, one of Soleum’s founding-partners, discovered and became interested in the macaúba. “At the beginning, two things caught my attention: the enormous potential for oil production and the fact that the challenge of seed germination had been resolved,” says Morbi, who started to focus his studies on the species. “The more I studied, the more I was surprised by the versatility of the macaúba for the production of oils, biomass, protein and fibers,” he says.

Recognizing that he had an uncut diamond in his hands, a new global sustainable commodity, Morbi put together a business plan and presented it to Rafael Pastori and Aurélio Pastori, businessmen in the metallurgical sector. The father and son believed in the project and invested in it, leading to the founding of Soleá in 2010.

The company focused on the challenge of domesticating the macaúba and transforming it into an agriculture crop. Two years after its foundation, Soleá acquired Acrotech.? Along this journey, Soleá also acquired a 2,600 hectare farm in Jo?o Pinheiro (MG) to house Acrotech’s germplasm bank, the genetic improvement program and the experimental fields (with more than 300,000 trees and different genotypes of macaúba). Using the seeds from the elite plants collected from the plantations, Soleá started planting macaúba palms for seed selection, always assessing the best reproductive plants, and leading to the current capacity to produce enough selected seeds to plant more than 50,000 hectares per year, with greater areas planned for the future.

“In this orchard, following selection, only 20% of the best reproductive plants are kept alive for the production of open pollination seeds. The rest are eliminated so they do not contaminate the seeds produced with inferior quality genetics,” says Motoike.

“With this capacity for the production of improved and high quality genetic material, we have the biggest germplasm bank, giving us a significant advantage over the second biggest bank. The other banks that we know of don’t have the production capacity to be able to plant more than 2,000 hectares a year,” says Morbi.? “This means that those projects that wish to plant macaúba with improved genetics on a large scale will have to start their germplasm banks and genetic improvement programs now, then wait at least 8 years, until the characteristics of their plants have been confirmed, and only then can they start crossing and producing selected saplings on a large scale.? If they don’t, they run very high and unknown risks, using extractivist genetic materials,” adds the co-founder of Soleum.

By merging the two companies, Soleum has consolidated its position as the only company in the world capable of planting macaúba using select and high-quality macaúba on a large scale, before then moving on to the next stage, which is to plant its first 180,000 hectares of macaúba as part of an Integrated Crop-Livestock-Forestry system (ICLF) to supply five industrial units focused on producing sustainable feedstocks for different segments.