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Two years into his land restoration project in Niger, Mr Rinaudo had yet to see any success. Expensive tree planting programs failed time after time.

"I was feeling very discouraged because I knew full well that most people weren't interested at all," he says. "In fact, they actually called me the crazy white farmer."

He could see their point. "Here they were, often short of food, very, very poor, and here's this crazy white guy coming in and telling them they should be planting trees on their precious farmland."

On the desolate road, Mr Rinaudo, a devout Christian, said a prayer and soon after, noticed "a useless looking bush" nearby. He walked over to take a closer look.

"In that instant, everything changed," he says. "I realised, no, it's not a bush, it's not an agricultural weed - it's a tree, and it's been cut down."

Nigerien farmers typically slashed the small shoots that grew from tree stumps, but Mr Rinaudo realised in that moment these "suckers" offered the answer he was looking for.

"Everything that we needed was literally at our feet," he says. "I realised then I didn't need to plant trees, we weren't fighting the Sahara Desert, I didn't need a multi-million budget - we just needed to work with nature instead of fighting it and destroying it."

Mr Rinaudo is at pains to point out that growing trees from stumps - what he called farmer managed natural regeneration (FMNR) - is not new.

It's a centuries-old method of cultivation practised around the world.

The key to FMNR's success is its simplicity. Mr Rinaudo quotes permaculture founder Bill Mollison, who said "though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple."

"I love that," Mr Rinaudo says, who has become known as the "forest maker" for his work re-greening degraded land around the world.

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