Through mixed cultures, he learned of the role of microorganisms in the soil, then focused on how ecosystems affect productivity. “ Growth in mixed cultures increased on average by 30%.” Götsch says he made interesting discoveries during this time. In the 1980s, as his peers focused on genetic engineering in the lab, he was in the greenhouses experimenting with mixed cultures. Yet Götsch stuck to the old practices even during his studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. But those traditions were lost and considered obsolete during the Green Revolution of the 1950s, driven by advances in agrichemistry. Fruit orchards were usually at the edge of the forest,” he says. “There were many hedges between the fields. He’s a farmer’s son from Lake Constance and is old enough to remember the hard years after WWII, obstinate enough to resist the trends that have come and gone in agriculture and science.ĭuring his post-war youth, Götsch observed the farmers and their ways of working the fertile land around Lake Constance. Götsch is 72 years old, skinny, with a goatee. Their destination is the Invernadinho soy farm near Mineiros, where Swiss agronomist Ernst Götsch is holding a workshop on syntropical agriculture. The three dozen landowners in Borges’s motorcade traveling through the soy fields are looking for ways out of the trap. That means they have their own silos, grain banks and transport fleets to ship the soy. The all-round packages still work for the very big players with the best soil and control over the whole production chain. Borges says he needs to use more glysophate but still sees lower yields. Today, the model is reaching its limits: glysophate resistance and soil infertility have reduced productivity by up to 30%. The yield was up to 3,600 kilograms (8,000 pounds) per hectare, Borges says. Twenty years ago, the soil was fertile, the harvest abundant, glysophate-resistant crops were not an issue. The sales are transacted over the internet, and the soy is exported for use in animal feed, mainly to Asia and Europe. It’s made Borges a rich man he lives in a luxury compound and can send his children to the best universities. He harvests twice a year, soy and corn in rotation, and sells to commodities traders like Cargill and other multinational brokers. “We spray chemicals at least 11 times per harvest cycle, on average every 10 days,” says Borges, a black-haired, pensive man in a checked shirt, jeans and straw hat. The 49-year-old owns 10,000 hectares. That’s the way Borges and the men and women in the caravan have been cultivating their land for decades. Cooked up in laboratories, the packages are tailor-made to withstand the environmental risks - climate variations and all sort of pests - unique to this area. Companies such as Bayer-Monsanto, Novartis and Pioneer deliver what’s known in the industry as technological packages: genetically modified seeds bundled with specially adapted pesticides and fertilizers. Industrial agriculture has been practiced here for three decades. Every few miles, a few tall red cedars and ironwood trees, replete with parrots, are a reminder that the Cerrado was once the transition forest to the Amazon.īut for the most part, the sun burns down on the flat, nearly shadowless land.
Green soy fields stretch to the horizon, separated by straight, reddish-brown dirt tracks. Brazil is the world’s biggest producer of soybeans, and half of it is grown here in the savanna-like region of the country known as the Cerrado, according to the national statistics institute, or IBGE.
Borges, a landowner, is following other farmers to a workshop on the road near Mineiros in the midwest of Brazil, the grain-growing heartland of the country. MINEIROS/GANDÚ, Brazil - Behind the wheel of his black suburban van, Paulo Borges has to squint to focus on the SUV motorcade in front of him, vanishing in a red cloud of dust. It is climate-friendly, ecologically sustainable and above all cost-efficient, attracting a growing number of soy farmers in Brazil interested in implementing it.His syntropic farming system imitates nature and is based on successful agroforestry methods.Brazilian-based Swiss agronomist and cocoa farmer Ernst Götsch has created a model of organic farming that he says can replace the Green Revolution that was driven by advances in agrichemistry.
0 kommentar(er)
