Farming Technique Developed in U.S. Is Embraced Abroad

By PAULO PRADA
September 30, 2005

CABECEIRAS, Brazil - When Albino Ampessan bought a farm here in 1982, the land
still bore the scrubby bushes, gnarled trees and wiry grasses typical of
Brazil's vast central savannahs.

Migrating from the country's more fertile, more crowded south, Mr. Ampessan was
undeterred by the rugged terrain, purchasing 620 acres and planting soybeans
with the help of his three sons. The area was historically unproductive. About
two hours outside the country's capital, Brasília, the farm and surrounding
savannahs were thought useful only for grazing cattle.

Then the wet season came, flooding much of his first crop. Subsequent years
brought more rain, time and again washing away topsoil, seedlings and most of
the new farm's promise.

"We lost a lot," Mr. Ampessan, 77, said. "We had to try something new."

So the Ampessans turned farming on its head. Instead of plowing before each
planting, they leveled the previous crop, let the residue decompose and seeded
the following year's crop directly in the mulchy remains.

The run-off ceased and within a decade the farm had a layer of topsoil that "now
grows whatever you plant," he said. Whereas the land initially produced 1,870
pounds of soybeans an acre, the farm - now 12,000 acres - last year produced
3,470 pounds of soybeans an acre, in addition to other crops like corn,
sunflower and pineapple. The Ampessans were pioneers in Brazil of no-till
farming, a practice increasingly used worldwide to fight soil erosion and
enhance fertility. First developed by American scientists in the 1960's, the
technique, also known as conservation tillage, has taken root here faster than
in any other country and has helped Brazilian farmers become some of the world's
most productive, competitive exporters.

While there were some 5 million acres of no-till farmland in Brazil in 1992, by
the end of 2004 more than 54 million acres, or half the country's farmland, was
no-till, according to the Brazilian No-Tillage Federation, in the southern city
of Ponta Grossa. The no-till methods, along with genetically modified seed,
transformed the Cerrado region here into the breadbasket of Brazil, responsible
for half of the country's soybean production and a third of its corn.

"Conservation tillage is helping Brazil conquer the world market," said Wayne
Reeves, research leader at the Agricultural Research Service, a division of the
United States Department of Agriculture. "They copied it from the U.S., but did
it bigger and better."

The technique spread just as advances in plant genetics were allowing tropical
growers to cultivate crops, like soybeans, that once grew only in temperate
climates. Helped by past currency weakness, Brazil today is the world's largest
exporter of sugar, beef and orange juice, and the second-largest exporter of
soybeans after the United States.

Traditionally, farmers till land to kill weeds and make soil crumble more
easily. But plowed dirt can wash or blow away. Tilling also exposes lower layers
of earth to sunlight, evaporating moisture and burning nutrients.

As herbicides grew cheaper and less dangerous, many agronomists began urging
farmers to forgo tilling altogether. "It's radical to throw your plow out the
window, but it does wonders," said John Landers, an English agronomist who works
in a no-till group in Brasília and who helped introduce no-till farming to
Brazil.

Because no-till plots retain water otherwise lost to runoff, Brazilians first
used the practice in areas that suffer from erosion or drought, like the central
savannahs. But lower costs - practitioners spend less time on tractors plowing
soil - led farmers throughout Brazil to follow suit.

"Farmers economize fuel and labor," says Dimas Resck, a scientist at the soil
research center operated by the state-run Brazilian Agricultural Research
Corporation, or Embrapa, near Brasília. "But they end up boosting crop yields,
too."

The practice is growing apace worldwide. Farmers in neighboring Argentina and
Paraguay, for example, have begun following Brazil's lead. In Western Australia
- Australia's biggest, but one of its driest states - conservation tillage
increased wheat and barley production so much that the practice grew to cover 92
percent of the state's farmland over the past decade, according to Rolf Derpsch,
a German and Chilean agronomist recently hired by Australian growers to study
their farms.

Adoption in the United States has been slower. Though many farmers in the Plains
use no-till planting - overplowing, combined with drought, created the dust bowl
of the 1930's - other American growers have been loathe to alter conventional
methods. No-till plots at account for 23 percent of United States farmland,
according to the Conservation Technology Information Center in West Lafayette,
Ind.

Yet studies in the United States indicate conservation tillage could raise crop
yields even in regions where plowing has traditionally been deemed a must. In a
joint study published last year, the Agricultural Research Service and Auburn
University researchers said no-till methods raised average annual cotton
production on experimental plots in eastern Alabama by up to 324 pounds an acre,
or nearly 15 percent, over a three-year period.

One reason American farmers remain slow to adopt the practice, some scientists
say, is that government subsidies numb them to the growing competitive advantage
it lends foreign producers. Compared with Brazilian farmers, who compete on the
world market with little or no state support, American growers this year are
expected to receive $19.5 billion in government subsidies - nearly twice as much
as in 2004, according to the U.S.D.A.

"There's a lack of economic incentive," said Ardell D. Halvorson, a soil
scientist at the Agricultural Research Service. "Without grants, it would have
spread more." In Brazil, further adoption depends on the sustainability of
agriculture itself. Rapid increase in soybean production, for instance, led to a
glut in supply this year, causing farmers to lose money and scale back planting
for 2006. (Neither of the recent hurricanes in the United States did much damage
to soybean crops, though costs of fuel and transportation are rising for
farmers.)

There are environmental concerns as well. In addition to the encroachment of
croplands in the Amazon and other forests, ecologists question no-till farming's
reliance on herbicides. The technique, after all, works because practitioners
prepare plots by poisoning weeds that compete with crop seedlings. The rapid
adoption of no-till methods also leads environmentalists to worry that some
farmers, convinced the technique is a cure-all, may forgo other basics besides
plowing. Farmers who abandon crop rotation, for instance, discover that untilled
soil remains just as vulnerable to disease and mineral depletion as conventional
farmland.

"You have to remain on guard," warns Roberto Smeraldi, director of the Brazilian
chapter of Friends of the Earth in São Paulo. "You can still drain the soil of
nutrients. You can go overboard on the chemicals."

But those who switch from conventional farming say the practice allays many of
those concerns. For openers, the amount of chemicals used in conventional and
no-till farming is roughly the same. And the crop residue on the topsoil, some
scientists argue, keeps the earth moist and fertile. More fertile soil means a
more efficient use of other chemicals, like fertilizers, and richer soil also
means less demand for additional farmland, these scientists say.

"Much of the forest already cut would not have been had the know-how existed
earlier to improve productivity in other parts of Brazil," said Norman Borlaug,
the 1970 Nobel Peace laureate for research in agronomy that helped increase
global food supply, in a phone interview from his office in Mexico City. At the
Ampessan farm, Roberto, Albino's 52-year-old son, recently drove from the
red-brick farmhouse to a small pond amid two fields littered with corn and
soybean stalks. Vicente, his younger brother, pointed to a dozen ducks paddling
across it, their brown feathers camouflaged against the muddy water. "It dried
up when we plowed," he says, explaining how rainfall that once evaporated or
rushed into nearby streams now trickles slowly through the soil and into the
pond. "After a few years, the pond and the ducks came back."