Source: Dispatch Online
WALKING on a dusty field of cut rice that was once rainforest, researcher Flavio Wruck explains how farming, the Amazon’s biggest killer, can be turned into its best defender.
At the government-run experimental farm where he works, he points towards plots where crops, cattle and timber live together.
It’s a simple system, long practiced in the US, of rotating crops and revitalising pasture instead of simply chopping down forest and planting new grasslands. But in the state of Mato Grosso (“thick forest”), where ranchers and farmers have destroyed more of the Amazon than anywhere else, it’s a relatively new idea.
In the Amazon, the practice has been for ranchers to raze a patch of jungle, plant pasture and graze cattle on it for about 20 years until it’s exhausted, and then rip up a fresh patch of virgin forest.
It’s up to Wruck and others to convince farmers and ranchers that by diversifying and renewing the nutrients , they can farm the same tract for several generations and make more money.
“Our integration system rapidly increases the efficiency of crop and pasture land, allowing, for example, ranchers to graze as much as five times more cattle on the same piece of ground,” Wruck said during a recent visit to the 750-hectare Fazenda Gramada farm run by Brazil’s agricultural research agency Embrapa.
“That means we can break the cycle of ranchers needing to deforest to create more pasture.”
Brazilian officials and environmentalists agree that cattle ranching is the biggest cause of deforestation of the nation’s Amazon, an area the size of the US west of the Mississippi River, about 20 percent of which has been destroyed.
The rainforest may be the world’s best defence against climate change because it absorbs the carbon dioxide blamed for global warming. But the gains are offset by burned or rotted vegetation that releases about 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon emissions.
Right now the government is claiming stepped-up policing has produced the biggest annual drop in deforestation since it started keeping records 20 years ago.
But with only 1400 agents overseeing about five million square kilometres of the Amazon, and most of those bunched in targeted areas, environmentalists have their doubts, saying the real reason is the global economic slowdown and the drop in demand for cattle, soy and timber.
The government aims to reduce deforestation by 80 percent within a decade, and Wruck’s challenge is to foster smarter farming.
But the slash-and-burn mentality among Brazilian farmers is hard to crack. Moreover, the drive for more ranching and farming land is higher than ever to feed Brazil’s rising demand for meat and China’s appetite for soy.
Complicating the problem, only about five percent of private land is even titled. That makes it hard to prove who is responsible for illegally destroying the forest, leading to a culture of impunity and even more deforestation.
A typical plot on Wruck’s farm alternates rows of balsa or eucalyptus trees, a cash crop, with 30-metre wide areas of pasture. Every five years, the pasture is replaced by a grain or cereal crop which replenish nutrients in the soil. With hundreds of acres put to use this way, a rancher will have constantly rotating areas of grazing and crop lands, along with timber.
One convert is Mario Wolf Filho, a rancher, farmer and president of his farmers’ union in the town of Nova Canaa do Norte.
“I’ve been able to triple my productivity in the same area without opening more forest,” he said. “It’s fantastic. I make economic gains and not at the expense of the environment. It’s Brazil’s way forward.” — Sapa-AP