Brazil Agricultural Revolution Of May Slow Demise Amazon

Cassio Carvalho do Val plans to invest almost 2 million in more than 10 000 cattle on his ranch on the edge of the Amazon.

But instead of burning the forest to graze freely on the increase of his flock, which will break with tradition by reducing grazing and the addition of grains to your diet.

Val is one of a growing number of farmers in the so-called integrated betting and diversification of agricultural production and income. His move represents a silent revolution, and fragile, which involves a departure from Brazil slash-and-burn-over.

This trend can also help relieve the slaughter of largest rainforest in the world.

Soybean producers are turning more fields with corn and cotton, forests, plants and raising livestock. The farmers are planting corn to supplement their traditional diet of cattle grazing.

This tends to higher production and more efficient while reducing pressure to increase the surface, and bodes well for consumers struggling with food prices worldwide, and environmentalists, who see Brazil as a crucial battlefield.

These investments in efficiency are not new in the U.S. or Europe. They are, however, the tropical grain and cattle in Brazil, which means that there are risks and uncertainties.

"I lost 80 calves a year, Jaguar," said Val, from the house covered with dark hardwood in the south of Para state, where all the complex movements such as breathing active sweating.

Val, Sao Paulo University-educated sociologist, is one of a growing number of farmers to adopt more scientific production. He hired consultants to help them develop a set of new skills in the cultivation of cereals.

However, incorporates a large number of older rural feel that have thrived here, in an era defined by man against nature. The jungle and the woods were the enemy.

Brazil, with its chronicle of social inequality, he invoked the settlement until the last decade to people and for the large U.S.

inside.

Val's father is packed burro by 40 days to the area that is now Redenção in 1959 - a black and white walls of the aging Don Trek on the farm of his son. Pull-de-la-hop, the pioneer spirit still revered here.

He said government funding to clean 220 square miles of forest land he had bought the title and the name of Rancho Santa Teresa. The family has sold most of the farm.

Dictatorship of the time threatened to reclaim the land the settlers "if they failed to improve, which means clearing the forest to raise cattle and crops.

Unbridled expansion policies eventually put pressure on the environment and trade to a point in the last decade, the fears of the Amazon would be lost, accelerating global warming.

Backlash

Government efforts to curb agriculture also threaten to derail the much-needed investment for farmers to maintain the improved yields in existing sectors and the law of orderly growth.

Brazil area of ​​5.3 million square kilometers more of 625.000 square miles of unused land that can legally be converted for agricultural purposes, according to IBGE.

Katia Abreu, a senator and leader of the National Confederation of Agriculture, estimates that the current legislation governing land use criminalize 70-90 percent of Brazil's 5 million farmers and ranchers to cut the wood that had been Supported by the State of previous governments.

Some are guilty of illegal land clearing by the laws had prohibited such a practice, she admits.

"Most of them are victims of poor law enforcement," Abreu said, adding that the new bill before Congress should return to normal with most of the legal status of the farmers'.

The implications for world food prices could be profound. China, Europe and the Middle East is the main buyer of Brazil and a few percentage points of variation in production of soybeans, beef, sugar and coffee prices could send the market reeling.

Valley plans to invest in real-time 3000000 (1800000 dollars) to plant the corn, 9 square miles 88 miles square in his pasture. The remaining 94 square miles of his ranch must remain in this part of the Amazon forest reserve.

His farm is in the legal order and would be eligible for government-subsidized financing. However, many farms are not.

Four hours south of the estate of Val d'double Falavinha farm is built Deciolandia 80 square miles, Mato Grosso. It was classified as savanna biome, which means that 20 to 35 percent of the farm was to be forest reserve.

But after the authorities have redesigned the biomes of Brazil, the region may be required to comply with the requirements of the Amazon basin reserve 50 percent. Reforestation costs should be high.

Federal agencies are notoriously slow to provide essential services. Farms of more than 3 square miles must submit the satellite map of their land for land reform agency INCRA.

But farmers say INCRA is understaffed for the workload as it is, and the government plans to eventually expand the number of farms smaller properties, which must present the card.

"We spent R $ 10,000 to complete the mapping of the property and presented a year ago and still nothing," the owner of the farm, Geraldo Falavinha said the tumult in the ginning of cotton. "We are excluded from public funding and the need to invest."

Where's the beef?

The key to large farms in Brazil is integrated livestock, especially from the preservation of the Amazon and other tropical biomes are concerned.

Pará, Val says, is expanding his flock of about 30,000 from 20,000.

A recent study conducted at the Institute for Atmospheric Research The research has highlighted the main source of livestock pressure behind deforestation.

Inevitably, the leaders of Brazilian agriculture and livestock to jump on the number of 137,000 square miles of grasslands in Brazil, which can be easily converted to agricultural land, "without cutting a single tree." Currently, Brazil 66.875 miles square factories to commercial crops and forests.

But the conversion of grasslands to sown area is not simple. This raises the question of where the cattle graze.

The production of Brazilian beef is grass fed, unlike the United States and Europe, where the grain in feedlots used for most.

U.S. food writer Michael Pollanen says the animals must be taken out of the "massacre of their typical diet of grain," and not "eat grass" to help reduce the high grain prices.

Brazil - the world's largest exporter of beef and an important grain producer - many of the ranchers and farmers would not agree.

"The cattle have to eat more corn here at the slaughterhouse before. There is less impact on the environment, "Darci Ferrarin Jr. said his farm integrated DGF Sorriso, Mato Grosso.

Brazil could double or triple the cattle per hectare from the current average of about 1 head / ha, simply by the introduction of cereals in their diet, better farming methods, and fertilization and replanting of grasses in pastures, analysts say beef.

"We make more money from this type of agriculture, but the nature and the consumer," he said while addressing one of the precious white Nelore heifers her sister, who is nearly seven feet high and weighs as much as a mid-size car -.