Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics

Robert W. Wilcox. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017. xviii and 323 pp., selected timeline, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, glossary, index. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4773-1114-1).

Until recently, most historically framed studies of Brazilian land and society issues treated aspects of the plantation system, where the emphasis lay mainly on the parts of this vast country relatively close to the Atlantic coast. In his perceptive 2002 review essay on a series of studies dedicated to deepening knowledge of nineteenth-century Brazil, the historian Marshall Eakin (2002) argued that to a large extent, “the map of Brazil was a fiction that did not become a reality until late in the twentieth century” (p. 260). To understand Brazil, Eakin called for expansion of the research agenda to include the extensive regions beyond the axis of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in southeastern Brazil. In this respect, Mato Grosso forms an important candidate. Created in 1748 as a captaincy of the Portuguese colonial government, Mato Grosso became one of the largest territorial units of Brazil until the 1940s (second only to the various denominations used for the Amazon region). During the past half-century, the states of Rondônia, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul have all emerged from this earlier territory. Despite the scale and importance of the region—the herds of cattle today present in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul exceed 50 million head—a research focus on Mato Grosso remains uncommon. Robert W. Wilcox's book represents a signal and welcome contribution.

In terms of land use, ranching is of key importance to understanding Brazilian development and it includes many layers. Wilcox has researched a most valuable book, one for which he let his research mature over a considerable period. It sits at the interface of historical geography and environmental history. The doctoral project began under the supervision of the late Warren Dean, whose influence on the increasingly vibrant field of Latin American environmental history has been massive. It is also the case, however, that the substance and research methods of Dean's own work linked directly with historical geography.

Archival research on frontiers provided the beginning for Wilcox's research on Mato Grosso but he has taken things vastly farther, writing a book where the emphasis moved much more to people and the land. To address these relationships more fully, the author draws on a wide variety of literatures and argues “that the expansion of cattle was more disorganized than generally assumed, largely because of a multitude of contradictory factors inherent in ranching” (p. 3). Although his initial project ended around the middle of the twentieth century, the book usefully considers more recent dynamic trends in the Brazilian center-west region. It offers much to those interested in the science of ranching in the tropics, showing especially the very great importance of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA), whose cattle research headquarters of national significance is located in Campo Grande, part of the heart of the cerrado region of Mato Grosso do Sul. The key phase in Brazil's numerical increase in its cattle herds is the quarter-century between 1970 and 1995, when the population of animals bred for beef doubled.

The challenges of scale are legion when writing about Mato Grosso, a portion of the Americas where the scale of properties controlled by individuals and companies could sometimes exceed the area of some of the smaller European countries (p. 9). The diversity of the natural resource potential for ranching varied considerably. Wilcox conveys well the complexity of the topic, above all for the seasonally flooded wetlands of the Pantanal, the region whose distinctive ecology is treated at greatest length. Huge areas of Mato Grosso form part of the cerrado biome, where low soil fertility and drought result in pastures of generally low-quality steppe grasslands. The unlocking of the potential of the cerrado still has a generally short history and the longer term environmental consequences remain in question.

In a region where changes in the ranching economy came very slowly, working out the chronology of change is extremely difficult. Wilcox uses the shocks to the world economy occasioned by World War I as his main organizational break. Documenting how ranching took hold in these vast interior regions involves numerous threads, including military colonies. The Portuguese Crown fostered ranching as a tool for the occupation of territory. Almost all of the ranchers squatted on public land. Wilcox establishes a careful picture of mainly poor ranchers struggling to access markets. Mato Grosso saw itself pulled mainly in two directions. There was a lengthy history of communication with the core settlement areas of Brazil in the east, through the establishment of organized cattle trails of truly vast length. The railroad arrived in Mato Grosso in 1914, but its overall economic impact on ranching remained limited. Another set of influences, the importance of which has varied along time, are the water highways of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, which link the interior core of South America with the Rio de la Plata. Rivers drew capital toward inexpensive raw material. Fray Bentos in Uruguay, often termed the kitchen of the world, provides an already well-known example of this. In more muted form, meat industry enclaves also began to appear in Mato Grosso, originally involving capital from Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The multiple subsequent layers of foreign involvement make for fascinating reading, above all the major investment made in 1911 by the U.S. entrepreneur Percival Farquhar in the Brazil Land, Cattle and Packing Company.

After World War I, Mato Grosso gained a profile in salt-beef (charque) production. The producers, located mainly along the Paraguay River, confronted enormous challenges in terms of access to markets. The slowness and cost of shipping hindered development. At the height of its salt-beef production, during the 1920s, Mato Grosso supplied around 7,000 metric tons of salt-beef, second only in scale to the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. By way of comparison, this was still only around half of Rio Grande do Sul's production in a much earlier period, the middle of the nineteenth century (Bell 1998, 78). Wilcox expresses well the challenges of this period as follows: “The very liberation of the region through expanded export production and a direct link to the economic center of the country also permitted a form of dependence on outside forces that was more subtle but no less limiting than the previous experience” (p. 98).

Wilcox's chapter on breed improvement is probably the part of his book that will find the broadest appeal. Mato Grosso served as a laboratory for the testing of the zebu cattle from India. Yet the early phases of its adoption were much contested across various parts of Brazil. Wilcox provides the fullest analysis of the background of breed debates for Brazil to this point. In recent decades, the science of livestock breeding has advanced massively in the Brazilian tropics. This zootechnical work from Mato Grosso has been of critical importance for the expansion of the ranching sector in the Amazon, where the environmental implications, unlike the case of Mato Grosso, have caught world attention. Today the Nelore variant of the zebu predominates in the massive Brazilian national cattle herd, with the conspicuous exception of Rio Grande do Sul.

Some sections of this book read perhaps deceptively easily. A reader can lose sight of the immense depth of research undertaken into topics such as techniques, products, and markets. There are many authoritative discussions of specific matters, helped by how the author reached out to regional authorities engaged in the business. Thus we have evocation of children's riddles with regard to ecology. Drove trails were much narrower in Mato Grosso than they were in Rio Grande do Sul. There is a very clear account of the veterinary measures implemented to combat equine anemia (mal das cadeiras), a major constraint on the ranching of the region because it had sometimes caused extremely high mortality levels of the horses and mules needed to work the ranches. Material on the important matter of cattle buying is particularly rich. The study of contract records from local land offices brings valuable material on mutual dependence between ranchers. There are still some sections that are written hesitantly, possibly a reflection of the extreme challenges of finding data on such important themes as the chronology of adoption of wire fencing or planted pasture. A great deal of rich data is presented in tabular form, on comparative regional land prices, for example, setting those of Mato Grosso into a broader context. The scope for mapping historical Brazilian census data remains immense. The preparation of thematic maps, beyond the three general ones printed at the front of the book, would have helped with reader comprehension of complex material in this study.

This book opens multiple themes for further research. There is scope for a great deal of future research on the core and periphery structure of ranch improvement in South America. Technical changes almost invariably came earliest in the core of the Río de la Plata, above all the humid pampa of Buenos Aires. As the temperate zones of the ranching complex refined their products and achieved new markets, this created scope in the interior for the expansion of more traditional ranch products, such as salt-beef. A good deal of the capital involved in this came from Montevideo. Although Argentina set the standard in ranching technology, this country was in its own right a very large place. Comparative references to Argentina in the ranching literature are often geographically loose. Wilcox provides careful evidence of the influences coming from the Upper Plata, mainly Corrientes and Paraguay, in the slow transformation of Mato Grosso. These neighboring regions await closer research scrutiny in their own right.

In recent decades, the status of pasture improvement has shifted dramatically in Mato Grosso and a key driver of landscape change has been the planting of millions of hectares of brachiaria (signalgrass). The planting of grasses only became common in Mato Grosso during the 1970s. In an earlier modern phase of planted pastures, Wilcox makes a brief allusion to pasture improvement in Argentina, hinting at the planting, mainly by immigrants, of vast areas of alfalfa there during the decades around 1900. The historical geography of planted pasture remains a research subject of key importance for understanding the broad economic geography of uneven development in South America.

After reviewing a myriad of environmental challenges present in the ranching of Mato Grosso, Wilcox displays a sympathy for the regional knowledge accumulated by ranchers. In working toward the resolution of technical issues that blocked the fuller development of tropical ranching, Mato Grosso became a place of numerous debates about authority that operated at multiple geographical scales, including domestic and foreign. Where were ranchers in the huge interior regions, usually places very short on working capital, to turn for practical advice? Professor Robert Wallace, the holder of the chair in agriculture and rural economy at the University of Edinburgh, had become positive about the potential of the zebu for breed improvement while in India during the 1870s. Even as the early twentieth-century experimenters in Mato Grosso were leaning on Wallace's testimony to support their working with the zebu, it seems ironic that one of the fiercest critics of the breed, based in southern Brazil, was drawing on the same Scottish expert testimony to bolster his case for working with specific British breeds. The fascinating field of authorities, one with no small number of confused prophets, forms a rich historiographical vein for future researchers to explore, not least with regard to understanding the environmental specificities across the vast expanses of South America. Wilcox's treatment of cattle breeding offers a model for future research.

Setting the present work on Mato Grosso alongside recent research on Amazonian ranching (Hoelle 2015), we increasingly have the building blocks to begin working toward broader works of synthesis. Even for Brazil specialists, there has long been the danger that Mato Grosso represents a formless void in the imagination. Although some of Wilcox's discussions of cultural groups, native and foreign, remain tantalizingly brief, his book offers many pointers toward a rich cultural geography in Mato Grosso. Taken overall, his book is certainly a major contribution.