Smarter farming key to saving Amazon rainforest

NOVA CANAA DO NORTE, Brazil — 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.

"That means we can break the cycle of ranchers needing to deforest to create more pasture."

Brazilian officials and environmentalists agree that cattle ranching is the biggest cause of deforestation of the nation's Amazon, an area the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, about 20 percent of which has been destroyed.

The rainforest may be the world's best defense against climate change because it absorbs the carbon dioxide blamed for global warming. But the gains are offset by burned or rotted vegetation that releases about 75 percent of Brazil's carbon emissions.

Right now the government is claiming stepped-up policing has produced the biggest annual drop in deforestation since it started keeping records 20 years ago — 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) from August 2008 to July 2009. That was 46 percent less than the previous year.

But with only 1,400 agents overseeing about 5 million square kilometers (2 million square miles) of the Amazon, and most of those bunched in targeted areas, environmentalists have their doubts, saying the real reason is the global economic slowdown and the drop in demand for cattle, soy and timber.

The government aims to reduce deforestation by 80 percent within a decade, and the challenge for Wruck is to foster smarter farming.