Opinion: Ranching doesn’t have to destroy the Amazon rainforest

Can ranchers help rescue the Amazon?

It’s an ecosystem like no other. One 19th century explorer called it “the last page of Genesis, yet to be written.” Brazil has been busy drafting that page ever since, sometimes to alarming results.

A fifth of the rainforest has been cleared for farms, cattle grazing and ambitious development schemes such as highways and megadams, too often by lawless means and for only fleeting wealth. Unless the economy, governance and culture of the region undergo a fundamental reset, scientists fear, the entire biome may be on track for irreversible dieback.

So it may sound paradoxical to suggest that beef cattle must be part of the Amazon solution. But that’s the only viable path forward.

We already know a lot about what hasn’t worked. About 40% of Brazil’s 218 million head of cattle graze in the Amazon basin, often under precarious conditions. It takes one to two hectares of pasture on average to sustain a single head of cattle. Even then, prosperity fades quickly. When pastures fail, ranchers traditionally hack their way deeper into the frontier.

The result is a swath of partially or severely degraded Amazonian land nearly the size of Great Britain, good neither for grazing nor planting — never mind the global climate. There’s the well-documented loss of rainforest that used to suck up carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen, and there’s the addition of ever more cattle: Livestock kick in nearly a fifth of all the methane — a super greenhouse gas, up to 80 times more potent than CO2 — that Brazil spews into the atmosphere every year.

That’s the challenge. Now here’s the good news: After decades of research, on top of sometimes devastating trial and error, Brazil today has the tools and experience to glean value from the land without trampling it under — even on Amazon ranchland.

For three generations, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research company, Embrapa, has led experiments to recuperate degraded rainforest and help ranchers produce more without toppling any more forest. Cattle farmers now know ways to expand their herds while keeping the forest standing, such as grazing under tree crops.

Another method is to intensify farm production by rotating livestock between prescribed quadrants of the ranch to optimize productivity, avoid overgrazing and replenish spent pasture. One study found that by boosting cattle productivity with these and other means, Brazil could meet demand for timber, beef and crops through 2040 without toppling any more forest.

Agronomists at Embrapa discovered that by sowing amendoim forrageiro, farmers could keep the soil covered, prevent erosion and suck nitrogen from the air and into the soil, so easing the bill for expensive fossil-fuel-based fertilizer ($15.1 billion in 2021) imported from unreliable and perhaps illegal suppliers such as Russia. Less fertilizer means less carbon from livestock hurled into the atmosphere.

Nor is it realistic to ban Amazon beef from markets and menus. Some 89% of Amazonia’s 1 million farmers are small producers, for whom beef and dairy cattle are an important household investment and a reliable hedge against bad harvests and inclement weather. There is no prospect for sustainably developing the Amazon basin without sustaining those who live and work there.

Properly done, this transformation could conceivably convert cattle farming from one of the Amazon ecosystem’s biggest liabilities into an asset.

Thanks to greening sensibilities and 21st century science, at least now we know what many of these best practices are. And that’s the best news for the Amazon that we’ve had in decades.

Mac Margolis is a journalist and the author of “Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.” Robert Muggah co-founded the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank focusing on public safety and climate security. ©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.