Franke Dijkstra was born in the Netherlands. He arrived in Brazil as a boy, at the age of five, in March 1947. With his parents and siblings, he settled in the current municipality of Carambeí, in the Campos Gerais region of Paraná, which is known for having welcomed many Dutch immigrants. The Dijkstras had a vocation for working with dairy cattle, so much so that they brought 40 heifers and a bull with them on the ship when they left Europe for the tropical country. But at the age of 12, Franke was already driving tractors and, at 19, he was working on his own land, raising pigs and providing services to other farmers, including plowing land. A visionary, he realized that the sandy, shallow soil of the region would not last long if it was constantly turned over and, without plant cover, exposed to erosion between one harvest and the next. He began researching solutions in the early 1970s. He found that No-Till Farming was the salvation for his and many other crops. Along with his friends Herbert Bartz (1937-2021) and Nonô Pereira (1938-2015), he founded the Brazilian Federation of Direct Planting Systems (FEBRAPDP) in 1992. However, since the mid-1970s, this trio worked hard and for free – often paying out money – to promote Direct Planting and convince more farmers to adopt the System that made possible the current level of agribusiness development in Brazil. When Herbert Bartz planted the first crop without plowing the soil, in 1972, in the municipality of Rolândia, no one else was doing this commercially in the country. In 1980, there were already 130 thousand hectares under Direct Planting. A decade later, in 1990, one million hectares. And the three never tired of giving lectures in small towns or promoting large Meetings with hundreds of participants. In 1998, data from FEBRAPDP indicated that 10 million hectares were being cultivated under Direct Planting in Brazil, preserving 100 million tons of fertile land per year. In 2022, Direct Planting will complete 50 years of history in Brazil, reaching an area of ​​35 million hectares. FEBRAPDP estimates that between 15% and 20% of this entire area is cultivated as determined by the Direct Planting System, with all its principles. In other words, there is still much to be done from an educational point of view. That is why Franke Dijkstra does not stop, even after losing his great companions Bartz and Nonô. In 2020, he launched the book “The soil taught – A path to the future”, which was released in English in 2022. It is a work full of historical and scientific data, with many photos and graphs. A must-read. At 81 years old, Franke Dikstra is still willing to speak and teach. That's what he did in the interview we present in this video. Watch. Share.