RONDONOPOLIS, Brazil – If the sight of gopher holes and molehills in the pasture upsets you, don’t take up ranching in Brazil.
There, in tropical conditions, the grass grows fast and everything seems bigger Ð including the pests. Instead of little gopher mounds, Brazilian pastures are often covered by metre-tall termite mounds; instead of 10-centimetre-tall ground squirrels and little blind pocket gophers, Brazilian cattle producers sometimes come face to face with the giant capybara, the world’s largest rodent, which can be one metre long and weigh 70 kilograms.
These are gophers that don’t have to stand up to see you coming.
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In the ranching area of the Pantanal, capybaras can be seen moving in packs of up to 40 animals.
Fortunately, they don’t bother ranchers much, because there’s lots of vegetation for them to munch in most areas and they don’t tend to dig holes. The termite mounds also don’t cause a lot of problems.
“They don’t bother the cattle at all,” said Regina Ward, wife of a large producer who farms near Rondonopolis.
The termites live underground, eating dead vegetable matter, which doesn’t hurt pastures. They don’t bite the cattle.
Producers have tried to remove the giant, red termite mounds, but it doesn’t often work.
“If you cut one down, within days they will rebuild it,” said Ward.
The mounds go deep underground and removing the top doesn’t harm the termite community’s integrity.
“It’s a bit like an iceberg,” said Ward.
They do become a problem when cattle producers want to reseed a pasture. Some pastures have hundreds of mounds, each a few metres apart. Producers have to knock them down, then move in with grass seed.
Plowing the soil destroys the termite communities, and the mounds are not seen in cropland or newly seeded pasture.
Most Brazilian pastures have thick-leaved, bushy grass as their main forage.
They are mostly African varieties of grass that have been imported. The native Brazilian grasses are not able to withstand intensive grazing because they developed without the presence of large herds of herbivores.
Brazilian cattle producers first relied on east African grass types, such as Tanzanian, Mombasa and Masai, but government researchers have developed new Brazilian varieties from these African bases and now most grass growing in Brazilian pastures is Brazil-bred.
The pastures in the tropical areas of Brazil have many more trees than the cooler southern areas because the intense heat and sweltering humidity of the tropical summer is hard on cattle. Palm and other trees are often left in pastures so cattle have some shade.
Prairie farmers who hate fencing might also be intimidated by Brazilian fences.
Because the tropical Nelore breed of cattle has extremely thin skin that allows it to stay cool in the summer, barbed wire can’t generally be used.
Instead, Brazilian cattle producers use tightly-drawn wires that pass through the centre of the fenceposts.
Posts are normally made of strong wood or, more recently, concrete and other manmade materials.
Unlike the typical prairie fence that has three or four wires, Brazilian fences commonly have five to eight strands of wire.
