Thoughts on Brazil 🇧🇷(Will unpack these below)
🤯 Mind-blowing scale
💚 Sustainability driven by the economics
🤔 What makes a Nuffield scholar unusual?
I’ve just come back from Western Brazil. It marked the real start of my Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust journey (generously sponsored by Yorkshire Agricultural Society). Over the next year, I’ll be travelling across Europe, North America and Australia. Every Nuffield explores a topic - mine is to try to uncover how good ideas about soil management get shared between farmers.
Nuffield Brasil hosted the launch conference for this year’s cohort of Nuffield Scholars - 89 from 13 countries. It was a chance to learn about Brazilian agriculture, and to meet the unique bunch of people who have been given this year’s scholarships.
Three big things came through for me:
- The massive scale of Brazilian agriculture. It dwarfs what we do in the UK. They farm tens of millions of hectares. Tropical soils and climate allow two crops a year off the same field. A small country like the UK can’t compete in producing the bulk commodities that feed the majority of the worlds population. Our focus will always have to be helping feed the two billion people who can afford higher value food and shorter food miles. For Soil Benchmark it emphasised that if we want to have a significant global impact on soil health, the UK is a great place to start, but the big prize is the scale of Brazil and the US.
- Sustainable soil management is being adopted in Brazil - at that huge scale - simply because it‘s good for the farm’s business. They weren’t changing to claim a subsidy or get an environmental credit. They wanted more resilient yields and lower input costs. Researchers openly stated that their goal was to help farmers make more money, which meant that farmers seemed to trust them more, and followed their advice (which was often around better soil management). If environmental organisations back home really focused on helping farmers make more money, they might find they have more impact on the sustainability outcomes they are after.
- The ‘strike rate’ of interesting people among the Nuffield scholars was exceptional compared to day-to-day life. Why did I have more thought-provoking and insightful conversations in two weeks than I would normally have in two years? Firstly, they were a reflective bunch - not self-obsessed, but willing to stand back, look at, and talk about themselves and their lives in an open and truthful way. There are few quicker ways of building a relationship fast. Secondly, they were all ambitious. Not wanting to take over the world - just passionate about whatever it was they were pursuing, and wanting to make an impact with their work. They were forging the path in life that they wanted, not just drifting on the current. The two together made for some exceptional people I’m lucky to now call friends. Can’t wait to continue the conversations during my travels over the next year.
