About four years ago there was a flurry of commentary about Brazilian ag, noted here, when the World Food Prize was awarded to them.

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 that's on 1/3 of the land available. A recent article highlights the cerrado with a focus on its contrarian approach.

The increase in Brazil’s farm production has been stunning. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais ($23 billion) to 108 billion reais, or 365%. Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade, overtaking Australia as the world’s largest exporter. It has the world’s largest cattle herd after India’s. It is also the world’s largest exporter of poultry, sugar cane and ethanol (see chart 2). Since 1990 its soyabean output has risen from barely 15m tonnes to over 60m. Brazil accounts for about a third of world soyabean exports, second only to America. In 1994 Brazil’s soyabean exports were one-seventh of America’s; now they are six-sevenths. Moreover, Brazil supplies a quarter of the world’s soyabean trade on just 6% of the country’s arable land.

No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union. And Brazil has done it without deforesting the Amazon (though that has happened for other reasons). The great expansion of farmland has taken place 1,000km from the jungle. . .

Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable. Mauro Lopes, who supervised the subsidy regime, says he urged the government to give $20 to Embrapa for every $50 it saved by cutting subsidies. It didn’t, but Embrapa did receive enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution. It does everything from breeding new seeds and cattle, to creating ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that changes colour when the food goes off, to running a nanotechnology laboratory creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings. Its main achievement, however, has been to turn the cerrado green. . .

When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.

First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. . .Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers. . .

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. . . Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months. . .

Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. . .Embrapa also created varieties of soya that are more tolerant than usual of acid soils (even after the vast application of lime, the cerrado is still somewhat acidic). And it speeded up the plants’ growing period, cutting between eight and 12 weeks off the usual life cycle. These “short cycle” plants have made it possible to grow two crops a year, revolutionising the operation of farms. . .

Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.

Embrapa is even more fashion forward than that.

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.”

There's nothing surprising to me about their success since they are doing sensible things, but I can see why they are both celebrated and vilified since they don't follow the script for developing world ag.

THE world is planting a vigorous new crop: “agro-pessimism”, or fear that mankind will not be able to feed itself except by wrecking the environment. The current harvest of this variety of whine will be a bumper one. Natural disasters—fire in Russia and flood in Pakistan, which are the world’s fifth- and eighth-largest wheat producers respectively—have added a Biblical colouring to an unfolding fear of famine. By 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production must double to meet demand. And that cannot easily happen because growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short.

The world has been here before. In 1967 Paul Ehrlich, a Malthusian, wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over… In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Five years later, in “The Limits to Growth”, the Club of Rome (a group of business people and academics) argued that the world was running out of raw materials and that societies would probably collapse in the 21st century. . .

Brazil has followed more or less the opposite of the agro-pessimists’ prescription. For them, sustainability is the greatest virtue and is best achieved by encouraging small farms and organic practices. They frown on monocultures and chemical fertilisers. They like agricultural research but loathe genetically modified (GM) plants. They think it is more important for food to be sold on local than on international markets. Brazil’s farms are sustainable, too, thanks to abundant land and water. But they are many times the size even of American ones. Farmers buy inputs and sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them. And they depend critically on new technology. As the briefing explains, Brazil’s progress has been underpinned by the state agricultural-research company and pushed forward by GM crops. Brazil represents a clear alternative to the growing belief that, in farming, small and organic are beautiful.

That alternative commands respect for three reasons. First, it is magnificently productive. It is not too much to talk about a miracle, and one that has been achieved without the huge state subsidies that prop up farmers in Europe and America. Second, the Brazilian way of farming is more likely to do good in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia. Brazil’s climate is tropical, like theirs. Its success was built partly on improving grasses from Africa and cattle from India. Of course there are myriad reasons why its way of farming will not translate easily, notably that its success was achieved at a time when the climate was relatively stable whereas now uncertainty looms. Still, the basic ingredients of Brazil’s success—agricultural research, capital-intensive large farms, openness to trade and to new farming techniques—should work elsewhere.

I understand that it is necessary to continue to pound on the agro-pessimists. Their visions are dark and destructive, their development prescriptions are genocidal, and they are repulsive in word and deed. I've done some the of work to whack them as they deserve, but the Embrapa style agro-economic system is a more interesting subject. It is more truly scientific and so wildly successful.

One subject worth a narrow focus is the methods of nitrogen management. As noted above they have had the simple good sense to breed varieties of rhizobium adapted to local conditions, and so greatly increased microbial nitrogen fixation, an important issue for growers of legumes like soya. Their soil amendments to raise PH have a large effect on microbial populations and soil nutrient retention and availability. The study of “Amazonian dark earth soils”, aka Terra Preta or biochar, will make further contributions to this effort. Of particular interest to me is their work with the African grass Brachiaria humidicola.

as well as being highly nutritious and palatable to ruminants, brachiaria inhibits nitrification. Livestock have been almost universally vilified in climate change debates, but this capacity could see the grass take centre stage in the push to significantly reduce the GHG footprint not just of livestock production, but arable farming too. . .

CIAT scientists had known for more than 30 years that brachiaria grass could suppress soil nitrification, but they only recently found out how its biological nitrification inhibition (BNI) capacity works. In October 2009, in collaboration with scientists from the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), and Japan's National Food Research Institute (NFRI), they discovered and characterised brachialactone, a chemical compound in the plant's roots which is released into the soil and acts as a biological nitrification inhibitor, in turn reducing GHG emissions from brachiaria-based livestock systems.

I linked an interesting paper on the subject last year.

Here, we report the discovery of an effective nitrification inhibitor in the root-exudates of the tropical forage grass Brachiaria humidicola (Rendle) Schweick. Named ‘‘brachialactone,’’ this inhibitor is a recently discovered cyclic diterpene with a unique 5-8-5-membered ring system and a
-lactone ring. It contributed 60–90% of the inhibitory activity released from the roots of this tropical grass. Unlike nitrapyrin (a synthetic nitrification inhibitor), which affects only the ammonia monooxygenase (AMO) pathway, brachialactone appears to block both AMO and hydroxylamine oxidoreductase enzymatic pathways in Nitrosomonas. Release of this inhibitor is a regulated plant function, triggered and sustained by the availability of ammonium (NH4+) in the root environment. Brachialactone release is restricted to those roots that are directly exposed to NH4+. Within 3 years of establishment, Brachiaria pastures have suppressed soil nitrifier populations (determined as amoA genes; ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea), along with nitrification and nitrous oxide emissions. These findings provide direct evidence for the existence and active regulation of a nitrification inhibitor (or inhibitors) release from tropical pasture root systems. Exploiting the BNI [biological nitrification inhibition] function could become a powerful strategy toward the development of low-nitrifying agronomic systems, benefiting both agriculture and the environment.

I'll repeat comments that I made at that time.

There's fierce competition for nitrogen and so it's not really surprising that there are plants that have found ways to do battle with soil bacteria that would otherwise contribute to loss of food for the plants. What is interesting is the indirection. The plants don't inhibit the denitrifying bacteria directly, they inhibit nitrifying bacteria that provide food for the denitrifiers, since plants can use ammonium as a nitrogen source.

The paper further asserts that plants that take up nitrate emit nitrous oxides from their leaves whereas those that take up ammonium for their nitrogen source do not. Since ammonium is a cation it is less mobile in soil and doesn't leach away like nitrate. Inhibiting nitrifying bacteria would then benefit the plant even more.

Nitrate fixing bacteria that either associate with legumes or are free living bypass inhibition since they directly produce nitrate, but the majority of commercial nitrogen fertilizers and all organic nitrogen goes though an ammonium step on the way to nitrate. It's a good place to intervene in the nitrogen cycle.

Some grasses such as wild wheat can do this trick, which suggests that it might be possible to teach other food grasses such as wheat and maize to do it too.

I think that this is important. We hear factoids about nitrogen management - such as that biochar adsorbs ammonium and so "reduces nitrous oxide emissions" - from special interest advocates such as climate wankers. Emissions are irrelevant. The issue is plant growth and that is enhanced by systems that are attuned to ammonium rather than nitrate. If we are able to develop brachialactone secreting varieties of other important grasses - including cereals as well as forage grasses - it will not only lower the fertilizer bill and increase yield, it will reduce nutrient leaching and loss to atmosphere.

There are also efforts to develop coatings for fertilizer prills that inhibit nitrifying bacteria, but recall that it isn't just commercial fertilizers that would benefit since all forms of nitrogen (protein) goes through an ammonium step during bacterial mineralization. It's how the nitrogen cycle works. Anything we can do to delay the return of nitrogen back to the atmosphere increases the benefit to plant life.