Meet the world’s first Bird-Friendly Cacao farm

Dr Charles Kerchner didn’t set out to start the world’s first Bird Friendly Cacao farm. 

Instead, when completing his PhD at the University of Vermont in 2013, Charles founded a conservation project focused on the Bicknell’s Thrush (Catharus bicknelli), a small brown bird with a red-tinted tail and yellow-toned bill.

The Bicknell’s Thrush spends the summer months in high-altitude, dense coniferous forests in northern America and Canada. In winter, the bird migrates south, travelling more than 1,500 kilometres to reach wet broadleaf forests in mountainous regions in Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and Puerto Rico. 

“The project’s goal was to see how an initiative in the north could help protect habitat and biodiversity in the south, which is the limiting factor for the species,” Charles explains. 

It’s estimated that 51% of all Bicknell's Thrush winter habitat is located in the Dominican Republic, so it’s there that Charles based the conservation project, and together with private sector and non-profit stakeholders, purchased a 412-hectare property in the country’s northern mountain ranges. 

In 2013, this property became the first private reserve to be recognised under the government’s National Protected Area System scheme, which involved doing a biological inventory of what species were present and creating a management plan. 

As part of the plan, 289 hectares were designated “forever wild”, protecting thick forests and clear streams for the Bicknell's Thrush. This amounted to about 70% of the property. 

The remaining 123 hectares, all of which was degraded cattle land, was marked for cacao agroforestry. It took about five years to rehabilitate this land, with a mix of native tree and shrub species replanted alongside crops to mimic the structure and genetic diversity of the nearby forest.

“We replanted native species alongside cacao and macadamia trees,” Charles says. “There's also oranges, avocados and plantains for general consumption.” 

But, somewhere along the way, what started as a conservation project turned into a nature-positive business. “It’s called Zorzal Cacao and it’s been running for more than 13 years now,” Charles explains. 

Zorzal’s mission is to use cacao to finance conservation.

The business harvests, ferments, dries and exports cacao to artisan chocolate-makers throughout the world, and reinvests the profits into the reserve, which boosts the reputation and quality of the cacao, and strengthens the business model. 

“These profits completely subsidise the reserve,” Charles explains. 

“We're still a growth business. We didn’t go out and raise a bunch of capital. We’ve built the business, brick by brick.”

The model is inherently regenerative — which made Zorzal the perfect business to pilot our first nature-linked loan back in 2022.

Wedgetail’s nature-linked loans tie financial incentives to ecological outcomes. Each loan has a series of built-in nature milestones. As these milestones are achieved, the interest rate reduces, recognising and rewarding these positive outcomes for nature. 

Nature milestones are co-designed with each partner before the loan commences, intended to support the work that businesses are already doing or intend to do to enhance biodiversity or address threats to biodiversity.

Our nature-linked loans are built to support nature, business and people simultaneously — because land can only be truly protected when those who live and work on and near it are invested in its future. 

Since Zorzal piloted our first nature-linked loan, we have deployed almost AUD$7 million across 14 businesses in 11 countries, with plans to scale the program in 2025. 

Who pays when everyone benefits? 

Everyone in the world benefits from healthy rainforests and the ecosystem services they provide. But, when services are intangible and benefit everyone, it’s very hard to find people willing to pay for their upkeep. 

Economists call this the ‘free-rider problem’ — and it was the focus of Charles’ PhD. 

“I wanted to understand the economic drivers behind deforestation for agriculture and subsistence cropping,” he explains. 

Zorzal overcomes the free-rider problem by linking a public good with a private good. 

Just as electricity companies combine power supply (private) with renewable energy investments (public) and universities provide education to paying students (private) while conducting research that benefits society (public), Zorzal combines cacao (private) with forest conservation (public).

“We all benefit from biodiversity and a stable climate — and from initiatives that improve biodiversity and tackle climate change. This means we need overlap between the people managing those services and the people benefiting,” he explains.

“Environmental services can be very difficult to package and sell, so if you can tie these services in with a product that people eat, like chocolate or coffee, it becomes a little bit more tangible,” he says. 

And, if you have a charismatic hero species and compelling story, it’s even more tangible.

The world’s first Bird Friendly Cacao farm

For Zorzal, success isn’t measured in tonnes or dollars, it’s measured in hectares and bird counts.

In 2014, the Zorzal team started a bird monitoring program, encountering Bicknell’s thrush in 19 of 107 bird-count points, primarily in the rainforest reserve area. When this survey was repeated two years later, this number increased to 53 of 107 points.

This is great news for this hero species in particular, but it’s also an indicator that the whole forest ecosystem is healthy too, because the Bicknell's thrush is considered an ‘indicator species’ in the Dominican Republic. 

Indicator species are plant, animal or microorganisms that are highly sensitive to changes in their ecosystems. For example, some lichens can indicate air quality, certain frogs can indicate water quality, specific trees can indicate forest age, particular ants can indicate forest intactness and corals can be indicative of ocean temperature and acidification.

Bicknell’s thrush avoids bare or degraded landscapes, preferring dense, shaded forests with rich undergrowth and diverse vegetation. It is also highly vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, its presence — and in Zorzal’s case, increasing abundance — indicates a forest ecosystem has diverse vegetation and that the local climate is relatively stable. 

In 2022, Zorzal’s unwavering focus on habitat conservation was recognised by The Smithsonian, which awarded the business the world’s first Bird Friendly Cacao certification.

To obtain a Bird Friendly Cacao certification, farmers must either set aside 50% of their land as forest or maintain a minimum of 30-40% canopy cover with at least 11 tree species per hectare — with both of these factors highly correlating with bird diversity and abundance.

But there’s no either/or for Zorzal — it fulfils both of these requirements.

Conservation is cultural

In addition to growing and harvesting its own cacao, Charles utilises a recurring Wedgetail nature-linked loan to buy wet cacao beans from 59 neighbouring farmers who now have organic and Bird Friendly Cacao certifications of their own.

“Where we work, there are three public protected areas and two private reserves, one of which is us. Then, there are all these other farmers and producers that are not part of the private reserves or protected areas, but who have created a buffer that's bird friendly and organic,” he explains. 

“A lot of these farmers just know how to do it, because that's how they grew up farming.”

For the farmers who aren’t organic, who have been using pesticides, fertilisers or monoculture techniques, and want to transition to organic and bird friendly, Zorzal offers training sessions and has staff and technicians that visit the farms and offer recommendations.

“Teaching our network of farmers more about environmental stewardship builds value for their farms and Zorzal alike. Education is core to our growth as a business,” Charles explains. 

In 2024, Zorzal helped farmers with a combined 927 hectares obtain a Bird Friendly Cacao certification.

Organic, bird friendly farmers can access premium prices. However, Charles explains these premiums aren’t big enough to incentivise people who don’t genuinely want to transition. 

In his mind, these premiums are less of an incentive to farm using agroforestry, and more an insurance policy to keep farming this way.

“It's not an amount of money that’s going to change behaviour. It pushes the needle towards conservation, but you have to be someone who gets some pleasure out of farming this way. Then the payment compensates them for doing that,” he says. “It’s about recognising the work people are already doing.”

Interestingly, Charles has observed that social identity is more motivating than access to premium prices.

“I think people get more reward from being socially recognised as organic and bird friendly,” he says. “Are they part of this Bird Friendly Cacao program? Can they go to these meetings? Are multiple people doing it? Can they be recognised? That’s a lot of it.”

“Conservation is personal, but it’s also cultural,” he adds. 

Reflecting on Zorzal’s first decade, and thinking about what comes next, Charles hopes to see Zorzal’s model adopted around the world, as a wave of nature-positive businesses internalise environmental externalities and reap the benefits. 

“We’ve already increased the region’s areas that protect and manage biodiversity by over 2,300 hectares, which is equivalent to about 10% of all protected areas in the northern mountain range of the Dominican Republic,” Charles says. This figure includes Reserva Zorzal, a second private reserve, the 927 hectares of Bird Friendly Cacao certified farmland owned by partner producers, and 100 hectares that have been reforested with native species via a carbon compensation program.

“Our goal is to create a system where farmers are benefiting, biodiversity is benefiting and consumers are benefiting,” he says. 

“This is a replicable model that will spread worldwide.”

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Hero image credit: Pete Warren.