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  • 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




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