RONDONOPOLIS, Brazil – Farmer Eloi Marchett migrated north from Brazil’s traditional agricultural southern heartland to break new land in the state of Mato Grosso Do Sul in 1974.
He moved north again in 1978, into hotter and wilder countryside.
He now farms in what Brazilians consider the country’s “wild west,” a region of open and semi-developed lands from where most of the country’s huge new acreages and multimillion tonnages of soybeans are coming.
His path has followed Brazil’s agricultural development from south to north for a simple reason.
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“We see opportunity here,” said Marchett. “We think the future is here.”He now farms 160,000 acres of soybeans and can store 435,440 tonnes in his on-farm elevators. He owns 100 tractors and 70 combines and has 100 employees, not including many temporary workers at seeding and harvest times.
What Marchett and other big farmers in this area are doing would seem unbelievable to Brazilian farmers from the 1960s or 1970s, when this countryside of wide, spiky grasses, palm trees and red soils was seen as fit for nothing but cattle grazing.
But pastureland here is rapidly being turned over to crop production, converting steadily declining livestock carrying capacity into prime soybean producing areas.
Understanding this revolution is key to understanding the incredible growth of Brazilian soybean production, says Chris Ward, another large farmer in the Rondonopolis area of southeastern Mato Grosso, who immigrated to Brazil from New Zealand. Many people outside Brazil seem to believe its soybeans are coming from plowed-down Amazon rainforest, Ward said, but the reality is far different.
Brazilians don’t need and don’t want to plow down rainforests with unsuitable soil when they have tens of millions of acres of pasture in front of them. If Brazilians didn’t clear another acre, they would still produce more each year as their farmers realize how to better use their land.
“We don’t need more land,” said Ward, who plans to plant 25,000 acres of soybeans in the next summer crop, which will be planted in what Canadians consider the fall of 2004.
“Why would you want to pay to clear forest when you have at least 50 million hectares (125 million acres) of impoverished pasture that can come into crop?”
In the northern section of Mato Grosso, in which the Amazon rainforest begins, some forest is being cleared, but farmers see far more potential in “monkey scrub” – the bushy unused grassland, he said.
A drive across Mato Grosso or Mato Grosso Do Sul reveals gigantic fields of soybeans that fill the good land here. Corn fields are hard to find. In this wet summer season, farmers plant their best hopes for a money-making crop, which is almost always soybeans. After the soybeans are harvested, beginning in early February, farmers will plant corn.
Unlike Canada or the United States, which have a regular checkerboard of quarter-section fields, fields here often stretch for four kilometres, filling the old and wandering contours of converted pastures. Here the soybean crops often reach the horizon.
But rougher, more rolling country is still left to pasture, creating the same sort of environmental balance seen in a place like Saskatchewan.
The rich red soils here are acidic, and until the 1970s, there was no way to make them fertile for crops. But in the mid-1970s a large source of limestone was discovered in the area, and farmers ever since have been applying about 1.2 tonnes per acre of calcium carbonate when they break pasture. They supplement it in following years to produce a fertile soil for soybean and corn production. In the state of Mato Grosso Do Sul, in the heart of a cattle culture that goes back further than 150 years, the same revolution is occurring as people there consider the same logic as Ward.
Cattle producers have been slower to accept the promise of field crops than they have in Mato Grosso, but they, too, have found that outsiders are happy to come in, buy farmland and try to realize that potential.
Lucio Mauro Basso, who farms near Campo Grande, is another economic migrant, like Marchett. Basso’s family moved south from Rio Grande Do Sul 31 years ago, following a relative who had moved there. They bought 1,730 acres, which they began to use as farmland.
“Land was expensive there, cheap here,” Basso explains as the cause of the family odyssey.
The family now has 18,530 acres in four locations, growing 5,440 acres of soybeans and 740 acres of cotton on the farm Lucio manages. The rest is used for cattle grazing, catfish production and federally demanded environmental set-asides.
On average the farm produces 8.8 tonnes per acre of soybeans, although it has reached up to 10.3 tonnes.
Analysts believe that pastureland will fall from overwhelming dominance in Mato Grosso Do Sul to being only half the state’s acreage, said researcher Cesar Behling Miranda, the acting head of research and development at a Brazilian government development centre in Campo Grande.
To stop the cattle industry decline, he and fellow researchers want local cattle production to become more like North American production, where better use of rotational grazing, non-grass feeding and genetic development allow farmers to produce more value per acre of land.
“We are in transition,” said Miranda. “People here see themselves as cattle producers, but that will change with time. In time we will be 50-50 (cattle and crop production),” he said.
Only a tiny percentage of Brazilian cattle are fed grain before being sent for slaughter. They are kept on grass and Brazilians are proud of and promote aggressively their “natural” beef.
But Brazilian beef is much tougher than North American beef. Steers take up to 36 months to reach slaughter weight, and the average Brazilian carcass achieves only 50 percent dressed weight.
Brazilian beef is banned from many countries because of frequent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in recent years, and its toughness means most exported Brazilian beef is sold only in low-value markets.
Miranda said researchers and progressive producers want to take Brazilian cattle production up to first-world standards because they know if the industry does not offer more, it will continue to lose its place in the economy and the culture of Brazil.
“High prices for soybeans and cotton are making people think,” said Miranda.
