We hear a lot of bleating about Brazilian rain forest loss, but that's not the interesting ag story.

From only 200,000 hectares of arable land in 1955, the Cerrado had well over 40 million hectares in cultivation by the year 2005. The phenomenal achievement of transforming the infertile Cerrado region into highly productive land over a span of fifty years, the world’s single largest increase in farmland since the settlement of the U.S. Midwest, has been hailed as a far-reaching milestone in agricultural science.

The Cerrado is an arid brush savanna stretching over 120 million hectares across central Brazil from the western plains to the northeastern coast. With soils characterized by high acidity and aluminum levels that are toxic to most crops, Brazilian farmers had long referred to the area as campos cerrados – “closed land,” with little promise for sustaining production. . .

The Cerrado region now provides 54 percent of all soybeans harvested in Brazil, 28 percent of the country’s corn, and 59 percent of its coffee. Cerrado agriculture has also diversified to include rice, cotton, cassava, and sugar. For all crops, average yields in the Cerrado are higher than in other areas, with harvests reaching 4.8 tons per hectare of soybeans and 11 tons per hectare of corn. In addition, the Cerrado supports 55 percent of Brazil’s beef industry.

And it's only 1/3 cultivated. Even better . . .

The increased production of a variety of crops and livestock has made food more available and more affordable in Brazil. In the past 25 years, food prices have steadily dropped by an average of 5 percent annually. At the same time, the standard of living for many rural communities has been enhanced, with life-quality indicators rising 47 percent from 1970 through the 1990s.

“Eventually, the Cerrado technology, or one similar to it, will move into the llanos in Colombia and Venezuela and hopefully, into central and southern Africa where similar soil problems are found,” said Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and World Food Prize Founder Dr. Norman E. Borlaug. “This will bring tens of millions of additional acres, previously marginal for agriculture, into high-yield agriculture. Hundreds of millions of people will benefit from this work.”

While some losers dwell on climate armageddon (see previous post) the real story for food and ag is that a combination of ancient and modern techniques is hugely improving agronomic practices. The key to soil fertility in the campos cerrados was the use of lime and phosphorous, something the early Anabaptists did in Europe in the 16th century, and continue to this day all over the world. On top of that . . .

With improved soil chemistry and the support of flexible research institutions, plant scientists in Brazil have developed high-yielding crop varieties for the Cerrado that are more tolerant of aluminum toxicity and acquire soil micronutrients more effectively. In recent years, agronomists have also refined no-till or direct planting technologies, reducing environmental degradation and maintaining higher levels of soil organic matter.

What's more . . .

Embrapa’s laboratory in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, has also been studying ways to make carbon sequestration more efficient. Scientists have been examining what are known as “Amazonian dark earth soils,” small, fertile islands that were built up by pre-Columbian Indian tribes and that have especially high concentrations of phosphorous.

“We don’t know why that should be, but we are trying to understand and reproduce that phenomenon so that we can benefit from it now,” said Wenceslau Teixeira, a soil scientist who is in charge of the effort. “These islands have especially stable levels of carbon, which helps retain nutrients and is thus both quite useful and hard to find in tropical soils.”

I'd love to see 120 million hectares of arid brush savanna in Brazil stuffed with organic matter. That's a lot of carbon. And I'd love to see the same in other S. American and African countries. We have too much carbon in the air, and not enough in the dirt, but there's a lot of work in progress to change that.