Alfonso Davila Abondano is all smiles as he wades into a knee-high ocean of green kudzu vines as far as the eye can see. “Come here and walk on this soil,” he says to me. “Feel it? It’s like a sponge. Now look down here,” he says, pushing the coiling legumes to one side. The soil is dark and moist, despite the tropical sun beating down on us.

Davila’s kudzu makes an excellent cover crop and is doing its job — protecting soil, suppressing weeds and delivering nitrogen to build organic matter. Any Corn Belt no-tiller would be proud to grow crops in this soil bed, but we are far from any Iowa or Illinois soybean fields. We are in South America — Colombia, to be exact. The kudzu surrounds the main crop here —palm oil trees.

A few feet away, Davila points to a small tree. “These trees are here because the beneficial insects like them,” he says, pointing to some small ants among the leaves. “They fly over to the palm and eat the bad bugs; then come back here. That way we don’t need insecticides.”

Davila is vice president of the privately held, family-managed Daabon, the biggest organic palm oil producer in Colombia. Working without traditional pesticides and fertilizers, he and his brother Manuel, the CEO, might be akin to the Ben and Jerry’s of South America’s palm oil industry.

“I guess you could say I’m a new-age hippie,” he says with a laugh, “but this is our business model, and it works for us.”

Davila’s cheerful outlook belies the tremendous uphill battle his company faces producing palm oil in Colombia. Palm oil is the highest-yielding, least-expensive vegetable oil in the world. It long ago surpassed soy oil as the world’s most common edible vegetable oil and, like soy, is used in biofuel and retail products. World production has doubled in the past 10 years.

It gets a bad rap for trans fats, but that may be its least controversial feature.

Taking the high road
Palm oil producers have allegedly destroyed wildlife and grabbed land out from small-holder farmers and indigenous people in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce 85% of the world’s production (Colombia ranks fourth). While there are no orangutans in Colombia, more than 220,000 Colombians have been murdered since 1964 during the country’s civil war. Nearly 6 million people were banished from their farmland.

While some palm producers have been accused of adding to those displacement problems, Daabon’s business model is aimed squarely at differentiating itself from the industry’s bad actors, by doing more and better environmental and social programs. It ranks No. 1 in the world in the Sustainable Palm Oil Transparency Toolbox, which scores major palm oil companies on their impact on the environment.

Daabon hopes to win over doubters in the export market, especially rich consumers in Europe and North America. It wants to tap into the growing $80 billion market for organic worldwide, with three-fourths of that squarely located in the United States, where soy oil dominates market share.

In 2014, global sales from palm oil exports amounted to $34.7 billion. Soybean oil and palm oil are considered “substitute goods,” because food processors often switch between the two ingredients as the prices fluctuate.

Daabon does not do business as usual — not by Latin American standards, nor even North American standards. Vertically integrated from the soil to the grocer’s shelf, the operation now has offices in six countries worldwide. Its business model is wide open for others to scrutinize or copy.

It includes organic bananas and coffee along with palm. It has an eco-friendly co-generational chain, whereby leftover palm leaves mix with cattle manure in a massive bio-digester to create 2.75 megawatts of power per hour — enough to run the business and much more leftover juice sold to the local power grid.

It grows conservation trees that produce a fungus transferred into an off-farm research facility; the fungus is reproduced and used to combat insects among the palms.

The company is transparent about its extraction processes and where it sources palm. Just go to its website, daabon.com, and you can read its ethics position and trace everything back to the farm it came from.

Felipe Guerrero, the company’s director of sustainability, says certification auditors visit the plantation 40 weeks out of the year, just to ensure the practices Daabon claims it is doing are actually happening. USDA has been here to check on its USDA Organic certification, along with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Total transparency might be a painful concept for some companies, but it doesn’t require you to be perfect; it just means be transparent about how you do business,” says Guerrero. “We feel comfortable being looked at under a magnifying glass. That’s the way of the future, and it’s amazing.”

An engaging young man who speaks perfect English, Guerrero’s hippie vibe and high-energy outlook embodies company culture. He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma 16 years ago because he wanted to work in the oil fields, but he quickly realized he hated engineering. Shifting to environmental studies, he hooked up with Daabon at graduation and the company financed his master’s degree at Florida International University, a two-hour plane ride from Daabon headquarters in Santa Marta, the oldest European settlement in South America. He recalls meeting George Siemon, CEO at Organic Valley, a Wisconsin-based organic dairy. Siemon greeted him nearly barefoot.

“That’s when I knew, these are my people,” Guerrero says, laughing.

Working with small farmers
Daabon’s approach to business might seem more California-cool than Colombian, but it’s clearly by design — a way to separate itself from other players through strategy, market opportunity and high-value aggregation.

Some 40% of Colombia’s potential farmland went fallow last year due to ownership uncertainty, and former landowners are now fighting in court to reclaim their land. So it’s no wonder Daabon refuses to buy out nearby small farmers who may not have willing farm heirs to pass on the farm to.

The company won’t even work with middle-sized growers. It began building an alliance with small growers some 16 years ago and today works with 500 neighboring farmers who each own 36 to 58 acres of palm. Daabon pays them a premium for following strict organic practices. To avoid corruption, the farmers deliver palm bunches to centralized locations and get paid by electronic bank account — no cash.

In all, the company delivers 30,000 tons of organic palm oil annually — 2% of Colombia’s total production.

And where does it all go? Mostly Europe, but the U.S. buys plenty as well — for baby food, soaps, cosmetics and chocolate, or as a shortening for baking.

“These are ingredients that may not all be organic-finished products,” says Guerrero. “Some buyers are coming to us because they need to achieve a sustainability sourcing strategy; some are in the process of building a more sustainable ingredient lineup as they move to organic or meet some kind of eco-friendly consumer label.”

Potential for growth
Not all palm oil companies in Colombia will be as innovative as Daabon, but there is potential for growth, even without the organic spin. Colombia has 274 million acres; 51 million acres are suitable for agriculture, “but we are only producing on 17 million acres right now,” says Juan Fernando Lezaca Mendoza, director of Institutional Affairs at Fedepalma, Colombia’s palm oil trade organization. “That’s a lot of land and a lot of potential.”

Palm oil is second only to coffee in Colombia’s commodity production, but unlike coffee, it is not top-of-mind for most Colombians. “Colombia is a coffee culture, and Colombians see coffee as a small family business, so they support it,” says Lezaca.” They see palm oil as big business, but actually, 88% of our country’s 6,000 palm growers are small- or medium-sized growers.”

The country produces 1.3 million tons of palm oil a year; roughly 500,000 goes to biodiesel; 400,000 to domestic markets like food, cosmetics, animal feed or soap; and 400,000 tons are exported.

Lezaca, like his counterparts in the American Soybean Association, can argue a good case for his product. While high in saturated fat, it has zero cholesterol and is relatively low cost. The raw red palm oil, sold in high-end stores, is high in vitamin K and antioxidants. Palm has been successfully introduced in poverty-stricken areas as a way to replace coca (cocaine). And because it is a long-term tree crop, the farmers usually stick with it.

“Palm is an opportunity for people to get out of illegal activities in Colombia,” he says.

Sparing the rainforest
Palm production is blamed for deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But that’s not the case in Colombia. A recent study by Duke University and the University of Guelph analyzed satellite images over three decades and discovered little deforestation in Colombia, despite the fact that part of the country includes Amazon rainforest.

“Malaysia is the main problem for deforestation from palm, but unfortunately, the entire industry gets a black eye as a result,” says Lezaca. “One of the main companies in Malaysia was recently decertified by RSPO [Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil] because of child and slave labor practices.”

Buyers have taken notice. Last summer France slapped new taxes on Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil over environmental concerns, but then backed off after Indonesia allegedly threatened to cancel orders for new Airbus jets. Palm oil is an ingredient in Nutella, a popular European spread. Consumer pressure can be a powerful force.

“Malaysia and Indonesia made a national decision years ago that palm would take those countries out of poverty,” says Lezaca. “It worked, but they did not discuss the cost. It’s a big industry now, but they caused all this deforestation and lost wildlife habitat. They cleared land by burning.

“We’re trying to show the world we’re not the same,” says Lezaca. “Daabon is the leader, but we are working on this countrywide. We have a goal to have 60% of Colombian production certified sustainable in the next five years, and we have good advantages in labor practices and no deforestation. We’re in a good position to achieve this.

“This is where we want to go as a country,” he says. “It may not all be green production, but we are trying to be at peace with sustainable production processes.”

And that’s fine with Davila, who says he moved Daabon into organic 15 years ago because he got tired of spraying chemicals on cotton.

“Now when buyers come here to see if we’re really producing the way we say we are, they just have to be here at 4 p.m.,” he says. “That’s when the bullfrogs start singing. It’s a sign that there’s life in these fields. If we were spraying, it would be silent here.”