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[permaculture] How to change an unsustainable/divided family farm in Brazil to a prosperous Permaculture place?
- From: Joao Paglione <joao@bambubrasileiro.com>
- To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
- Subject: [permaculture] How to change an unsustainable/divided family farm in Brazil to a prosperous Permaculture place?
- Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 15:36:53 -0300
Hello,
I was quite pleased to come across this permaculture list
some days ago while googling for information about Permaculture and
Brazil. Came across some posts by a lady from the Permaculture Institute of
Bahia (northern Brazil).
During the past years, I have researched
sustainable solutions for my family's farm in the western part of the state
of Sao Paulo. This is primarily because for the past 30 years our farm has
never profited either one of my uncles and has become a dividing force
instead of a unifying forece.
The farm has only functioned because of
external input, namely money which came from my father who worked for
Citibank over 30 years. And we have only not gone bankrupt because of his
pension fund which mantains the farm and family.
This is why I became
interested in permaculture, bamboo, agroforesty, sustainable
solutions--whatever you want to call trying to stake out your small peace of
paradise on earth that can sustain and provide for those who live on it for
some time.
I am going to include background information of the farm
history, people, and region in order to better understand my intentions and
perhaps foster some interest and replies. It might get lengthy.
Our
farm is located in the Cerrado region of Brazil which is the second largest
biomass region of Brazil (for those interested in more information, this
page has an excellent overview of the region's characteristics http://www.agbrazil.com/brazil_s_agriculture_frontier.htm)
My grandfather came from Italy to work on the coffee plantations in the
state of Sao Paulo which once supplied most of the world's coffee. The
region was covered with coffee which was devastated in a frost (which
happens ever 10-20) 20-25 years ago. Then most farmers converted their
coffee plantations to pasture land which brought cattle grazing into the
region. This was quite successful monetarily for many people but wreaked
havoc on the region's topography (somewhat hilly and very prone to erosion).
You can see aerial photos of our farm here in 1995 where 100,000$s was spent
by bulldozing small "lake terraces" (sorry not sure of the proper term) to
recover huge gashes of erosion. In Portuguese, they are called "Curvas de
Nivel"
http://www.trekshare.com/index.cfm?p1=121&tripid=7195
[click
on fotos for enlargement]
The result of this cycle of coffee and then
cattle is that my region only contains 2% of remaining native vegetation.
Even along rivers, forests were cut down to create pasture for livestock.
Most rivers are heavily silted and riverbanks are very eroded. In some of
the aerial photos you can see how desertified the land around the river
became.
Nowadays everyone has invested heavily in soybean production
which has become a hot commodity in Brazil. This was positive in a way
because many of the farms decided to adopt "Plantio Direito" no-till methods
and terraced most of their farms with "Curvas de Nivel".
I wanted to
give you that small condensed history because my uncles have followed these
trends and my father has always supported them while working abroad because
he himself had the same cultural mentality. I don't blame them for their
errors because they knew no better at the time.
My first uncle
invested in coffee in the early 70s. He planted over 150,000 coffee plants,
built a coffee sorter/drier and all the necessary infrastructure. 2 years
later, just when the coffee was producing a first harvest, frost struck and
decimated the coffee. Naturally, he planted the coffee without regarding
that the lowest region of the farm is where frost collects. He knew no
better.
Then he decided to tear down 30 alqueires (a local
measurement of land which equals 2.5 hectares) of native forest to plant
beans, yuca, watermelons, etc whatever the other farmers in the region were
planting. This is very typical in Brazil and always follows a boom-bust
cycle with everyone one year making heaps of cash and then bankrupting when
prices fall due to oversaturation. Of course, they always sold their crops
to the middle man which many times gave them "flying checks" (as called in
Portuguese) which would bounce.
This continued for many years until
another uncle came along who was the hope for the family. He had gone to
school unlike my older uncle and gotten a degree in Agronomy. He decided to
go to the US upon graduation and applied for an internship. What he got was
10-12 hours a day of milking cows in Kansas. My father calls it "white slave
labour".
When he took over administration of the farm in the mid 90s,
my father had bought back half of the farm which my grandfather had sold to
fund his 7 childrens education. This portion of the farm was quite hilly and
very damaged from the previous owner. He cut down most of the forests and
planted irrigated corn year after year until he wore out the land. He also
created various pockets of erosion on the hillside with some holes 4-5
meters deep and 20 meters across.
At the time, the cashflow from the
US improved and my uncle thought he had learnt from my previous uncles
mistakes. So he spent heavily on repairing the erosion, terracing the land
viable for mechanized agriculture, and investing in cattle. Eventually, he
was in a worse situation than my first uncle because he had spent so much so
quickly. He wanted to have the best infrastructure on the farm, the
newest tractors and farm technology, and prove to my grandfather that his
sons weren't failures. Not to mention his entire agriculture degree was
geared towards believing that technology (expensive Massey-Ferguson tracors,
implements, monsanto seeds, herbicides, etc) can surpass our humanity
and nature. As one friend put it to me years later, "Your uncle is farming
in Brazil thinking it's Europe!".
Like many other farms in our town,
he was prayed upon by the rich cattleman who now also loaned money at 10% a
month. When he invested all the money into the infrastructure, he was forced
to sell the cattle to have money to plant. Traditionally, my grandfather
told me he always had cattle because as he put it "it was like having money
in the bank". Since the Brazilian economy and currency was very unstable
with high inflation, buying cattle was time-tested way of having a savings
account.
To make this long story short: My father retired from
Citibank unknowing that my uncle was owing loan shorks hundreds of thousands
of dollars. So the external cash flow to my uncle stopped and a crisis
struck. He was planting hundreds of acres of crops each year but only in a
vain effort to pay back loan shorks and creditors (brazilian banks
which are the #1 most profitable banks in the world!).
The crisis was
that there now wasn't money avaiable to BUY FOOD or pay for my grandfather's
health insurance (he is almost 90 years old). Quite tragic when you think
that they owned hundreds of acres of land, soil that was "fixed" as my
agronomist uncle put it -- all those expensive fertilizers and imported
soybean seeds had done the trick!, several tractors and implements, huge
prefabricated garages to house all that equipment, and even a gigantic
soy/corn "secador", literally meaning dryer in Portuguese which I guess
would be called a grain dehydrator/soy.
In my father's and uncles
mind they were doing what they though was necessary and environmentally
correct to provide security for the family years to come...
When I
returned to Brazil in 2000 and found this out gradually by myself, I became
disgusted and at odds with my uncles. I had grown up believing a lie like
everyone else in the region. I thought, what about organic products?
shiitake mushrooms? There must be solutions that can be done on a
small-scale with little investment to combat the gargantuan
agropetrochemical cycle. Why work yourself to death making the banks rich
and the multinational agrocompanies believing that exporting commodities to
the US and Europe would provide security and a future for your
family!
That is why I decided to stay in Brazil, talk to farmers,
research online and try to find a solution. Because everyone in my family
thought the problem was not having enough money to payback the bank loans
and continue expanding to try to plant more and more to pay that high
interest!! One of my cousins who came to Brazil, loaned them money and tried
to help them finacially told me "It's like a black hole".
Well, this
post has exhausted me because I didn't think I would write as much as I did.
But my objective was to describe how a simple united farming family in
Brazil where my grandmother had a garden where she didnt used pesticides,
made her own clothes and my grandfather had a little bit of cattle, and
coffee and would plant an acre of rice or beans became completely divided
and disillusioned because they bought into the Big Lie that consumers across
the world are buying into..
My father always told me he was working
to retire to just "live off the land". And yet here is Permaculture starting
me in the face and saying "You already have everything you need to live well
and at peace with nature. Here are the steps to follow. It will take time
and not be easy, but it sure beats being a Tool for the Man"
I
returned to the US in June and found an internship near New york where my
sister lives throug the site organicvolunteers.org. I worked on an
organic-biodynamic farm this summer and learned quite a bit about vegetable
production, even though they still depend on external inputs quite a bit..
it wasnt what I dreamed and hoped but it taught me a lot.
In Brazil,
I took a permaculture course in Santa Catarina (2 states below Sao Paulo)
and became very active with the bamboo movement there in the past
years..
I've recognized the problem, learnt about it, studied it and
seen examples of farms that work and are sustainable. Now that biggest
challenge is IMPLEMENTING IT!
Those are my dois centavos.
Hope
some of you take interest and see the photos of the farm online taken
throughout the years. I would love feedback and any suggestions.
Best
regards,
Joao Paglione
Brooklyn, NY
- [permaculture] How to change an unsustainable/divided family farm in Brazil to a prosperous Permaculture place?, Joao Paglione, 09/09/2003
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