Marcelo is a Nuffield scholar and is taking part in the organisation’s conference, bringing together bursary recipients from around the world in Cavan this week.
Marcelo’s cattle are grazed on the vast pastures but are also fed targeted supplementation, which he says is not standard practice in his area.
He targets the commodity market and after two years of rising prices, he says he now gets around €36 for the standard 15kg measure of beef used in Brazil, ie €2.40/kg.
Asked about European fears that Brazilian beef could undercut our production on price, he said: “There is room for everyone. This is a whole different product you are talking about.”
“Providing food worldwide will be a challenging job for everyone,” he added. “And here in Ireland you are better located than us near a huge market that is Europe.”
Brazil agriculture rising
Luciano Loman, another Nuffield scholar from Brazil, told the conference that his country’s agriculture was not only expanding in terms of farmed area, but also in productivity.
“Our planted area has been growing at a steady rate in the past 10 years by nearly 20%, mainly driven by soybean,” he said. “I’ve been on farms where you stand and everywhere you can see only soybean. You can drive 40km and you’re still on the same farm growing soybean.”
Yet, he added that Brazilians had become aware of the need to grow more food within the available land to become sustainable.
“It used to be a case of ‘I want to grow more, I’ll just cut down more trees’ – this is not the case anymore,” Luciano said.
An engineer involved in on-farm technology and resource management, he places a lot of hope in the development of new technologies and their adoption by Brazilian farmers.
“There is plenty of space for new technology because many people still used old ones and don’t yet have access to the databases that we have – some don’t even speak Portuguese,” the national language, he remarked.
This, however, will also require more investment in infrastructure to connect all farmers to market and knowledge centres, and Luciano said that the network of paved roads and railways remained insufficient in rural Brazil.
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