Rooting the Future in the Soil of Today
This is a collaboration for the freshmen edition of Anchoa, a Spanish-language magazine out of Argentina rooted in the examination of ingredients.
Augusto Colagioia doesn’t know when exactly things began to change on his family’s farm. For much of the history of Campo San José, the only changes that were made was the size of the ranch. His grandfather and tío abuelo, José and Domingo, were devout traditionalists, cattlemen from an old school of thought that rejected change and new technologies, preferring to stay faithful to the long-standing farming methods of the grasslands of the región pampeana. A classic campo mixto, the brothers dedicated their most fertile lands to planting vegetables and letting native pastures grow wild, both sets of crops later used to feed the cows that lived en las partes más marginales y menos productivas del campo.
When the Green Revolution, an agricultural movement built around the use of engineered seeds, pesticides and monocultures, arrived in the 1960s and spurred a rural flight from neighboring family farms, the brothers expanded and tended to their land the way they always had.
“There used to be a lot of family farms that were 40 or 50 hectares,” explains Colagioia. “They are all gone. All of the camps that surround us are rented out. I never met any of them. There was a shift towards concentrating production that was very strong in this area. It is a production that requires few people, a lot of machinery, a lot of energy and two or three crops that are strategic to the economy.”
The family stayed on their land, expanded and continued work as normal. It was when Augusto’s father, Walter, inherited the farm that they quickly adopted the technologies that the previous generation was long wary of, heeding the call that biotech and agrochemicals were the future of agriculture.
The wild pastures were intervened and planted with genetically modified oats, corn and sorghum and pumped with herbicides like inexpensive glifosato that solved the land’s neverending weed problem, which without the use of agrochemicals required constant, back breaking work. Just as it was promised, the wide adoption of biotechnologies quickly minimized work, intensified yields of both the agriculture and livestock, seemingly improved the quality of the soil.
“My dad is someone that is always looking to innovate,” explains Colagioia. “He saw the fertilizers and herbicides as a way to improve the farm. That’s the way it was advertised. From the point of view of a farmer, to be able to farm and protect yourself from bugs and weeds was a great idea. But that is a really reductionist solution. It’s too linear. ‘My problem is the weeds so let’s invent something to get rid of them.’ It’s a math equation. Nature isn’t like math. There is ecology. Everything is related. Everything affects something else because it is all connected like one big network.”
Colagioia’s understanding of the intricacies of ecology grew out from his studies in Agricultural Engineering, where he was introduced to concepts of regeneration and agroecological farming. “I was the first in my family to go to university. That was really important to my father. College created a space to begin to question everything that was going on on our farm. And once I saw it, there was no turning back.”
Today he is working as an educator and consultant for farms across the Buenos Aires province that want to transition to more sustainable farm models whilst regularly traveling five and a half hours from La Plata to the family ranch in Henderson, which is in the midst of its own slow transition to regenerating its native pastures and returning to the farm’s roots. Over the last four years, Colagioia and his father have arduously planted native grasses, which were entirely lost, and weaned the land off its addiction to herbicides.
---
The first transgenic seed was introduced to the international market in 1994. Two years later, Argentina would become an early and fervent soy producer, so much so that in 2003 the biotech magnate Syngenta proclaimed northeast Argentina as part of the growing “United Republic of Soy”. By 2013 Argentina sat amongst four other countries that make up 83% of the world’s total area of land cultivated with transgenic seeds. Its quick adoption isn’t that much of a paradigm shift; it falls completely in line with the country’s historic understanding of the role of agriculture and advancement.
“We are dealing with a social construction that touches the last 150 years of our history as a nation,” explains Maristella Svampa, an investigator and co-author of The Ecologic Collapse Has Already Arrived (2020). “This is a story that is tied to the export of raw materials, particularly cereals and meat. The agricultural model plays with our collective imagination and an idea of economic prosperity and well-being.”
Svampa points to a socioeconomic construct that began in the 19th Century with the Conquista del desierto, which decimated the country’s indigenous populations in order to expand the frontera and grab important agricultural territories that put Argentina on the world economic stage. The development of the national rail system in the decades that followed, particularly the Ferrocarril Oeste that extended like a web from Buenos Aires all the way to Mendoza, helped colonize the vast Pampa region and diversify Argentina’s growing agrarian economy from the world’s largest purveyor of cereals to an important exporter of meats, wool and leather to hungry European markets.
The expansion of the frontier and diversification of farming came with intense land grabbing. According to famed historian James R. Scobies’ Revolución de las Pampas (1964), the Conquest had been financed, in part, by government bonds that could be later traded in for land as the frontier expanded. “De un año a otro, la superficie disponible para explotación ganadera se había duplicado en dimensiones. Estas nuevas tierras pasaron directamente, como enormes propiedades, a manos de poderosos intereses pastoriles y especuladores. En 1882 la subasta pública ofreció las restantes tierras de frontera en parcelas de hasta 40,000 hectáreas de extensión.” Starting across the Pampa, Scobies continued, the agricultural revolution slowly tore apart a long-standing ecosystem of self-sustaining independent producers.
The country’s colonization of the land and subsequent Golden Age of sustained economic growth established exactly what Svampa referred to, the illusion of prosperity that lives more in our collective imagination than the reality of the national economy. It is a narrative that serves the interests of few and dominated politics and legislation throughout the twentieth century and particularly during the military governments of the 1960s and 70s. Throughout authoritarian rule, the roots of today’s hegemonic agriculture were firmly planted. State regulatory controls were slowly disbanded, privatization expanded, environmental and agrarian research was largely defunded and the concentration of land accelerated. That combination of rearranging the campo’s social fabric under authoritarian rule set up the foundations for the dominant agriculture that we see today.
Much of the cereales that are grown in Argentina are used as feed for livestock to fuel a growing global demand for meat consumption and to keep up with the country’s hunger for beef, much of which passes from open pastures to feedlots prior to slaughter. New methods for fueling livestock production have created a strange paradox. Farm lands that were traditionally used for campos mixtos de pastizales y ganadería are continuously displaced by farms that grow feed for cattle, thus pushing cows further north into land that needs to be deforested and leveled in order for them to thrive. Although carbon emissions are not Argentina’s principal problem (the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are below the G20 average) the degradation of lands that act as absorbers of carbon emissions pose an enormous threat to local and global environmental health.
Argentina’s decision to adopt engineered seeds and the pest and weed repellants needed to maintain them was predicated on a lack of scientific investigation into the environmental side effects of a radical new model. But the evidence quickly mounted. As investigator Pablo Lapegna pointed out in his book La Argentina Transgénica (2019), by the early 2000s scientists and activists were already sounding the alarms of massive deforestation de los bosques nativos del norte argentino, la aparición de malezas resistentes y la degradación continua del suelo además de daños del salud público y contaminación de acuíferos por el uso intensivo de agroquímicos cada vez más tóxicos.
---
In San Andrés de Giles, Pablo Harari has spent the last six years regenerating his family’s property. His parents were not farmers, and when Harari was seven years old they left the property and began renting it out to soy producers. The intensive farming methods destroyed the land, chipping away at natural pastures, eliminating nutrients and compacting the soil.
“I jumped head first into the project. In hindsight I realize that it was a really risky decision,” says Harari. “I arrived at a piece of land that had basically been abandoned and had spent years growing transgenic soy. I came with ideas of permaculture and self-sufficiency but the reality slapped me in the face pretty quickly. I spent all my savings to invest in basic stuff and to continue investing in things like electricity and a car, I needed to make money. That’s how Granja Cara Negra was started.”
Harari prescribes to the school of regenerative agriculture, a farming method designed in the early 1980s by Robert Rodale, who rejected the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Progressive deforestation, monoculture and farming practices that rely almost exclusively on toxic agrochemicals destroy soil ecosystems. At the core of the ideology is carbon capture through the regeneration of top soil, biodiversity and the water cycle, which not only create healthier farms but stronger soil that can aid the fight against the climate crisis. The Earth holds three times more carbon than the atmosphere, but as soil health deteriorates, the carbon escapes. Today the Rodale Institute is working with farmers across the globe, with special attention to restoring regions that have experienced desertization or are at risk of desertizing.
Whilst we continue to reinforce structures that consider ecologic devastation as an inevitable consequence of economic sustenance, the more difficult it becomes to imagine a radical shift towards an economic model that is rooted in sustainable agriculture. Cara Negra exemplifies this.
During the summer and spring Cara Negra grows a wide variety of hortalizas alongside gallinas y ovejas, which rotate around the farm and are integral to the process of controlling the growth of grass and restoring the soil diversity. Daily rotations ensure that the ovejas don’t just eat the plants or clear a single section of the farm, but rather eat what is around them and aid in the growth of stronger plants that improve soil quality.According to Harari, neighboring farms that practice conventional farming have to buy feed for their animals, whereas Cara Negra has a surplus of natural pastures and planted herbs and greens.
The farm was mostly self-sustaining, with a business model that resembled a volunteer-based community supported agriculture program. After an unsuccessful search for two more socios to expand the farm into a fully functioning farm and restaurant, he decided not to plant this summer and in January will move to Germany to continue learning about regenerative farm models. The future of the farm hangs in the balance. “In order for this type of model to function, it requires an incredible cohesion of people and skills. This is very complicated work in a country that is also particularly difficult to run a business.”
Harari alludes to an enormous obstacle for producers of all sizes: the absence of formal networks of producers, investors, government and agricultural engineers to share everything from information to financing.
---
Back at San José, Colagioia and his father continue to transform their 250 hectares of land. Although the switch to a conventional farming model gave immediate results, the transformation back to the original model is a long-term compromise. San José has maintained the profitability of the farm by reducing the use of agrochemicals and fertilizers slowly, financing the transition with profits from conventional farming as they push the balance further in the favor of agroecology. After four years of work, the farm has reduced their use of agrochemicals from 100% to 25%. Some parts of the land are beginning to develop soil conditions that allow native pastures to return and be strong enough that the duo doesn’t have to continue to replant every year. The path to a fully agroecological model is still a long one, especially with the holistic social component of agroecology.
“The necessity to innovate that my father felt then is the same reason he sent me to the university to study agriculture,” says Colagioia. “He always wanted to make the land better. But now we understand that we must innovate and stimulate a change of the whole model, not just what we produce but why we produce and for who. We need to start talking about land development, healthy crops and food sovereignty. We can’t continue to compartmentalize.”
Argentina has a big farming problem. The solution isn’t just switching back to old production models but rather reimagining an entirely new socioeconomic, political and psychological understanding of the function of agriculture. A new model that values ecological safety, public health and greater autonomy that can only function by reconfiguring the way that we eat locally and fuel the food chain globally. The challenge is in changing our perception of agriculture as a symbol of capital and development, distancing ourselves from frivolous relationships to the earth and aligning ourselves with those who work the land and nourish us with it.