"...nothing can befall me in life--no disgrace, no calamity--which nature
cannot repair." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
pete's gardens.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 11:36
AM
Subject: [permaculture] How to change an
unsustainable/divided family farmin Brazil to a prosperous Permaculture
place?
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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