Amazon Rain Forest and Smart Farming

Amazon rain forest and smart farming


Walking on a dusty field of cut rice that was once rainforest, researcher Flavio Wruck explains how farming, the Amazon's biggest killer, can be turned into its best defender.

At the government-run experimental farm where he works, he points toward plots where crops, cattle and timber live together.

It's a simple system, long practiced in the U.S., of rotating crops and revitalizing pasture instead of simply chopping down forest and planting new grasslands. But here in the state of Mato Grosso ("thick forest"), where ranchers and farmers have destroyed more of the Amazon than anywhere else, it's a relatively new idea.

In the Amazon, the practice has been for ranchers to raze a patch of jungle, plant pasture and graze cattle on it for about 20 years until it's exhausted, and then rip up a fresh patch of virgin forest.

It's up to Wruck and others to convince farmers and ranchers that by diversifying and renewing the nutrients in soil, they can farm the same tract for several generations — and make more money.

"Our integration system rapidly increases the efficiency of crop and pasture land, allowing, for example, ranchers to graze as much as five times more cattle on the same piece of ground," Wruck said during a recent visit to the 750-hectare (1,850-acre) Fazenda Gramada farm run by Brazil's agricultural research agency Embrapa.

More about Amazon rain forest and smart farmning.