Farming is easy, becoming Brazilian is hard: North American soy farmers’ social values of production, work and land in Soylandia

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, North American farmers have been migrating to Brazil to produce soybeans and escape a general farm crisis in the United States. This paper analyzes their work, values, social relations and relations with the land in order to understand transnational farming and agrarian change from the perspective of transnational farmers. North Americans’ migration to Brazil and soy production in Brazil can inform our understanding of the mechanisms of the soy boom and unpack the relative significance of social values at play in intensive, technified and financialized agriculture. It also provides an evocative perspective of the soy boom as it engages with issues of transnationalism, crisis, migration and change in business and farming practices. Using ethnographic data, this paper explores the intimate and emerging realities of agrarian change by detailing four elements of transnational farming – migration, farm management, land use and work – through the narration of three farmers’ career histories. These cases address the transformation of social values of work, land and social relations through the processes of migration and agrarian change. Farmers’ work, it is found, emerges out of an entanglement of regulations, expertise, meanings of work and land, worker relations and the political economy of Brazil and the United States.

Keywords:

• agrarian change
• values
• work
• transnational farmers
• ethnography
• soy
• Brazil
• United States

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfeld, Arturo Escobar, Gabriela Valdivia, Elizabeth Havice and Caela O'Connell for comments, and Susanna Hecht and Gustavo Oliveira for organizing this collection. Thanks also to Jun Borras and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. This research would not have been possible without funding from the Tinker Foundation and the Halperin Memorial Fund.

ORCID

Andrew Ofstehage http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4502-364X

Notes

¹All names in this paper are pseudonyms, in accordance with informed consent agreements.

²Estimated at 30 to 40 families, based on interviews with farmers and policy makers in Brazil.

³In addition to this group of Midwestern family farmers, a colony of 70 Mennonite families has farmed soybeans near Rio Verde, Goiás, since migrating from the United States in the late 1960s (Mello and Silva 2011).

⁴See Goldfarb and Zoomers (2013) for an extensive analysis of the expansion of this technology frontier in Argentina.

⁵I presented myself primarily as a researcher interested in the role and everyday lives of US farmers in Brazil.

⁶My own father experienced this crisis on our South Dakota farm as pressure to consolidate and narrow his production to a corn/soybean rotation, and as a community trauma. This experience and the general situation of my family's farm was shared with research subjects.

⁷LLCs and corporations reduce economic risk by protecting non-business assets from liability, and generally reduce tax burden.

⁸Ninety percent of corn planted, 90 percent of cotton planted and 93 percent of soybeans planted in 2013 were genetically modified (USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service 2013).

⁹Suggesting a leveling process and a shift away from agro-ecological expertise and in-field work.

¹⁰In this paper I use both ‘acres’ and ‘hectares’ to describe area; my use of each term is determined by how each farmer referred to land, whether using the US measure (acres) or the Brazilian measure (hectares). For reference, a hectare is equal to 2.56 acres.

¹¹Much like farmers’ resistance to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) control of air pollution and non-point source pollution in the US Midwest (Nixon 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Ofstehage

Andrew Ofstehage earned a BS in agronomy from South Dakota State University and an MSc in management of agro-ecological knowledge and social change from Wageningen University. His master's thesis, The gift of the middleman, is a study of agrarian change, social relations and value transformation in relation to quinoa commodification in Bolivia. He is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Fulbright Scholar. Email: [email protected]