BRAZIL AG
I'm doing a Brazilian podcast this morning and here is the preparatory information the host sent me regarding Brazilian agriculture.
I thought of giving you some context about Brazil, just in case you become curious about the larger cultural and economic patterns.
- 0.9% of rural real estate is composed of large properties (over 1000 hectares) working under the agribusiness chemical package. This 0.9% alone owns just under 50% of the productive land in Brazil.
- Compared to the 1990s Brazil is using 5x more chemical fertilizers, 8x more agro-chemicals (herbicides, pesticides and fungicides), that are now costing 4x what they did in the 1990s.
- From 1985 to 2019, Brazil lost over 87 million hectares of native vegetation, 70% of this area to the agribusiness GMO-chemical package.
- just under 70% of all water available is used in irrigation (under the agribusiness model).
- the agribusiness model is receiving over 400 billion Reais each year in federal subsidies (talk about agency capture!)
- it varies in different states, but usually below 50 hectares is considered a family farm business (with about 13 billion subsidies each year). However, although very romanticised in Brazil, family agriculture pretty much works as a microcosm of the agribusiness model, with GMOs and chemicals, only on a smaller scale.
- ecological production tends to be politicized and usually (but not always) lies with peasant farmers linked to agroecology and Via Campesina.
- I believe the greatest challenges for small ecological farmers are the agencies capture (laws are made for big players), bureaucracies to process and sell directly (the overheads are too high for most small farmers to sort or circle the red tapes), lack of marketing and accounting skills, a sort of rural inferiority complex and pretty much 500 years of primary production set up to please foreign economies.
As I read through this preparing for the podcast, I'm struck by the number of times in the last two weeks I've heard about an "American farm crisis." I remember the crisis of the 1980s when farmer suicide hotlines became common. I'm sensing the same kind of hysteria right now from the conventional farm community.
These Brazilian statistics are remarkably similar to American and show the squeeze farmers are in. That one line about 5X more chemical fertilizer and 8X more agro-chemicals is telling. The main culprit in all the conventional farm crisis reports I've read is higher inputs without commensurate sales income.
An older farmer in our area several years ago told me that in the 1960s when he was a young boy starting on the family farm, you could take a straight truck (single axle) load of cattle to the sale barn and with the proceeds buy the biggest new tractor available from any of the several ag equipment dealers in the county. Today, that truck load hardly buys a tire.
Consider this. In the past 80 years, the farmgate percentage of the retail dollar has dropped from about 50 percent to about 8 percent. The USDA budget is now bigger than the farmgate value of all commodities produced in the U.S.
The most important thing farmers need to do is to extricate themselves from everything conventional. Fertilize with compost (and its many cousins) instead of chemicals. Quit filling out subsidy reports and start growing something besides what the government gives you money for. Quit exporting and start direct marketing right here in our own country.
If farmers wait for the government to change their circumstances, they're going to go out of business. Farmers need to quit assuming someone from the government is going to save them. As Kit Pharo says, be a "Herd Quitter." In other words, quit following the herd and do something different. Radically different.
Should the USDA exist?
