Days 9 and 10: Redo
I’m actually writing this on Day 11, because the bad internet ate my blog post last night and I couldn’t face doing it again at 1am. Anyway, I couldn’t even remember what I wanted to write about last night because a CUTE GIRL sent me a NOTE at the HOTEL BAR last night! That’s a thing they do in Brazil apparently! It was really cute and flattering. She was adorable, but she didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Portuguese, so it wasn’t meant to be (besides the whole marriage thing, of course.) Still, it was fun to meet her and my coworkers were absolutely thrilled about the shenanigans, so I can’t complain. If there’s three things I know about Brazil, they are this: we’re going to take a picture together, we’re going to eat cake, and we’re going to participate in shenanigans.
Anyway! Onto my reflections.
Yesterday was all about cattle - we spent the morning at a mid-sized ranch using sustainable cattle management, and then the afternoon meeting with the minister for the environment in Sao Felix do Xingu. Meeting with the environmental minister was the first time I heard someone use sustainability language in the field, and even then not very much. I had overestimated the extend to which ideas and language about sustainability had made it into the farmer’s lingo. I think the penetration of those ideas in the US might be deeper. In SFX, it’s all about improving efficiency of resources and increasing return on investment. We are lucky that practices that are sustainable for the environment tend to also be sustainable for wallets, at least in this area.
We also got to hear from someone who I can only describe as a sustainable cattle influencer, Mauro Lucio. He is like, the #1 celebrity of Sao Felix do Xingu and quite the character. Big old cowboy hat and brass belt buckle. He spent all day giving lectures and interviews, and then went live at 4:30am this morning. What a champ. He is the guy who is championing a lot of the language that I mentioned above. The look on everybody’s faces when he talks is incredible - they really love this guy. I hope we can work with him.
I realized something important about cattle ranching through this and why we have such challenges with it. There’s a lot more variety in how individuals choose to raise cattle and spend capital on that project than there is with, say, growing crops. Pretty much any person can make money on cattle - you buy a calf for a certain price per pound, the calf grows up, and then it goes up for sale at a higher weight. Boom, profit. So there isn’t an incentive for people like this who are ranching as a sidle hustle to really manage their land appropriately when cows will famously eat anything. There are also the go-between guys who buy and sell cattle between the different farms and to the slaughterhouse who also have zero investment in how cattle is raised. So it’s not a matter of convening professional cattle ranchers as it is convincing everyone else who is participating in the supply chain.
If I never go back to Sao Felix, that would be fine with me. Kind of a shitty thing to say but it’s not a great town. There’s nothing WRONG with it, it’s just extremely poor which is extra upsetting because tons of wealth is generated by the mining work happening in town and also the largest cattle herd in the country located there. Despite both these things being true, 60% of the land in SFX is theoretically protected in some way — meaning that it’s ground zero for deforestation. It’s tough to swallow that slaughterhouses will buy and sell processing plants to control supply and demand to make a profit while half the people in SFX are living in concrete shacks. Did you guys know that wealth isn’t distributed equally?
Today was a big road trip back from SFX to Marabá. We are flying out of Marabá at 4 am today and now have a few hours to kill in the Belém airport before we continue to Altamira. This is the second-to-last part of this trip before we spend the weekend in Belém and I come home! I feel like this has went very fast so far. We’re only in Altamira for the day, and are taking at least twice as long to get there as we are to meet with people in the field, but that’s kind of how things work out here. It just takes a long time to get places. We were actually closer to Altamira when we were in SFX, but there’s intact forest between the two cities so we had to go back around the long way. Last thing we’d want to do is hurt some of that intact forest!
