1869, Ep. 166 with Andrew Ofstehage, author of Welcome to Soylandia

2:37PM May 14, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Andrew Ofstehage

Keywords:

Transnational farmers

Brazilian Cerrado

flexible farming

industrial agriculture

social values

land crisis

Midwest farmers

Brazilian land

agricultural practices

market dynamics

settler colonial narrative

farmland inaccessibility

investor relations

labor turnover

climate change.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Andrew Ofstehage, author of the new book, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. Andrew Ofstehage is Program Coordinator of the Global Academy at North Carolina State University. We spoke to Andrew about his research into a group of us Midwest farmers who now farm in the tropical savanna of Eastern Brazil, the innovative use of flexible farming by these large scale, industrial and elite farmers, and the role of social values in an agriculture that seems to be completely about money. Hello, Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Hey Jonathan, thank you for having me here.

Well, I look forward to talking to you about your new bookWelcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. Tell us the backstory to this project. How did your book come to be?

Yeah, I'd love to talk about it. I'll go back pretty far, right. So I grew up on a Cornell soybean farm, and I started my academic career as a agronomy student, I pretty quickly became bored with the idea of telling farmers how much fertilizer to put in their fields and how much pesticide to use and that kind of thing. But I became very interested in questions of how farmers do agriculture and why farmers do agriculture. So after I got my degree, I went to Wageningen University in Holland to do a kind of applied anthropology program which taught us social science methods, social science theories and practices. And I was running away from agronomy towards social science. I wanted to study the question of basically, why quinoa farmers in Bolivia were selling quinoa to intermediaries instead of farmer cooperatives or private sellers. And I had no interest in the soil. I had no interest in the land. Really. I just wanted to understand these markets and values and relationships. But in Bolivia, I pretty quickly understood that part of those markets and part of that production was the unique characteristics of the land in the community I was working in. So it was really high altitude, so they didn't need to use much pesticides, and it was really dry, so they didn't use much synthetic fertilizer, because they thought it kind of burned their crops. So I found myself kind of going back to agronomy and thinking really about how markets intersect with social values, but also how social values intersect with the natural environment, the land, the soil pests, climate, all this kind of thing. So for my PhD, I wanted to take this, these ideas of the interconnectivity of the land, of economy, of markets and people, and see if I could apply it to a different group. So when I tell people quinoa farmers have a lot of social values and that kind of thing, people say, Yeah, of course they do. But if you ask if the transnational industrial farmer holds a lot of values in the way they're doing agriculture. People say, of course, they don't like the, you know, they're, they're capitalist agriculture. Agriculturalists. They are only interested in profit. They're only interested in, you know, deforesting the Amazon, that kind of thing. And I want to see what other stories are here. How are they interacting with the land? How are they interacting with society, or were they, you know, so part of my interest in working with this group was challenging myself to see if I could apply these same ideas to a group that seems like they're kind of untouchable, like they don't have to integrate with the environment, they don't have to integrate with society, they don't have to think about these things, because they have enough capital and power to not worry about it. And so I want to understand really, you know, how are they engaging with soil? How are they engaging with workers? How are they engaging with the government of Brazil? But also, I was driven by curiosity. I was thinking about an American farm in Brazil and thinking, do they have red barns? Do they have their family there? Does their family the people working in the field, or do they have workers? So I really went into it with very little knowledge and a lot of curiosity to see what was actually going on there.

That's really interesting. So the the farmers you focus on were originally from the Midwest, and then they moved to Brazil to farm there. And as you mentioned before, these are these are not small farmers. This isn't Farmer Joe. These are large corporations, large scale, industrial, elite farmers. And again, as you said, we tend to like look at them as, like the bad guys. But it's not that clear cut at all. Tell us why you chose to study these larger farms. Arms, yeah.

So part of it was also building on that work in Bolivia, where I worked with intermediaries, who also have a reputation for being the bad guys, of taking advantage of people. And I really enjoyed that practice, and I found that the middlemen actually more frequently middle women in Bolivia, they want to tell their story, and they have a story to tell. And people have studied kind of the critical, critical outsider aspect of factory farms and industrial farming since the 70s. You know, it's very common, and I wanted to understand what actually work is going into this, how is this being created? And to get that story, it felt like you had to talk to the farmers. So part of it was a challenge of working with the bad guy, working with people who don't really want to be under the spotlight, but also a little bit of sympathy. And, you know, I found out through my research that, you know, they were dealing with land crisis in the United States. They were dealing it with it by kind of extending that crisis to another country. So in a way, that's not addressing the crisis, but it's really deepening that crisis. And they're also holding this kind of settler colonial narrative in themselves, and understanding that transforming land, natural land, to farming, is a good thing, and that developing land is a good thing, and making introducing new land into the market is a good thing. So, you know, I disagree with these, these, this perspective in the book, but I understand it, especially from growing up in a small farm in South Dakota. Another thing that really deepened my interest in this group was my very first interview for this research was with a tour operator, an American tour operator in Brazil, and I told him about my research. I said, I'm going to work with these farmers and do ethnography. And I'd explain what ethnography was, participant observation, semi structured interviews. And he said, these guys are not going to talk to you. These guys are not good people. Use a lot of colorful language that I don't think I can use on this podcast. And basically said, find something else to study. He even suggested there's another group of Americans in in the state of Goya, is to the southwest of Bahia. They moved in the 60s for religious reasons. He said, study them. Talk to those guys because they're nice people. So in the end, I actually did a comparative ethnography to talk to these, both of these groups, these groups. But hearing that, I really wanted to give it a shot. I really wanted to see if I can get these guys to talk to me, and I found, for a couple reasons, that they were really willing to talk. One is, I think they saw themselves as a hero, so their own story. And second, a lot of them are continuously looking for investors. So you see them in newspaper articles and in farmer magazines, that kind of thing. And so they have a pitch already, and they want to get the word out that they're in Brazil. They're doing good work from their perspective. So, you know, a lot of times I'd hear the same kind of exact verbiage that I had read in a newspaper article coming out of their mouths in an interview. So they were perfectly willing to talk to me, and it became super interesting. Yeah, nice,

nice. That's cool. We'll get it. I want to hear some of their stories. Well, that'll be towards towards the end. But yeah, you have some interesting characters in the book, for sure. So one of the quote you had mentioned the crisis and just the people, for people to get up to speed. There's a great quote that you have in the beginning of the book. You say the farmer and activist George Naylor succinctly describes the state of 21st century farming in the United States. Says that the typical farmer in the Midwest owns probably only 10% of the land that they farm, and the rest is cash rented landlords often take the highest rent bid from the biggest, most industrialized farmer goes out from there. It's a sounds really bad. So tell us. Tell us about the crisis in farming in the US, and that, What? What? What drove Midwest farmers to move to Brazil in the first place?

Yeah, so growing up on a farm in South Dakota, you heard a lot about the 1980s farm crisis, which is a moment where a lot of farmers had taken out loans on their land, and then the price of that land bottomed out. They lost a lot of value from the land, and then the borrower, which was the US government, called in those loans, and a lot of farmers lost their land. And farm loss for US farmers, especially small farmers, is is a massive crisis. It's not the end of the career. It's an end of a livelihood. It's a family crisis. It's personal crisis. It's really serious issue. The current crisis is is less severe than that. It's more about inaccessibility of farmland. So this is the fact that there's not much into contiguous land available. But also that with land. It is available, it's extremely expensive. So to be a beginner farmer starting out on that land, it's it's nearly impossible to do without going to severe debt, unless you have a lot of capital on hand or investors on hand. Not many investors are going to invest in a US farm, because it's not that profitable for corn and soybeans. But if you want to invest in in you know farm in Brazil that comes with production profit, but also the promise of speculative profit. So the way they're dealing with this farm crisis in the Midwest, of inaccessibility of land, of high price of farm labor in the US and lack of investment is to find a place where those things are not a problem. So Brazil, cheaply paid labor, very cheap farmland, and a promise of rapidly increasing land there. So for a lot of them, this is an escape. It's going to Brazil to farm there. For some of them, it's kind of just a refuge for a couple of years, they could go farm in Brazil for five to 10 years, sell that land in a massive profit, and then bring them capital back to us and start their own farm, you know. Or in what we're seeing in what I call flexible farming, it's more of a career model of farming. So that farmer comes out of farming in Brazil, and now they speak Portuguese. They understand Brazilian markets. They understand how Brazilian regulations work of agriculture. So they can they can come farm, but they could also become a consultant for Cargill or another multinational Grain Company. They have that experience, they have those skills, so they see it really as an investment in themselves, more than the family or the economy or anything like that.

Interesting, interesting. Tell us. Tell us more about this. You mentioned flexible farming. What exactly does that mean?

Yeah, so flexible farming is what I used to describe this really radical transformation of agriculture, and we see, you know, you mentioned the George Naylor quote. We've seen increasingly commodified farm life really increasing since the 1980s where there's more dependence on rented land, there's more dependence on farm workers, that kind of thing. But one of the cases, there still are a lot of connections. So, for example, Kathleen sex Smith has a lot of research on dairy farmers in New York bringing their workers partially into the family and saying, Well, workers are finished our work at 5pm but family members can work until the work is done, or to say you're part of the family, we expect you to come to the birthday party or that kind of thing. You need to be the social engagement. So it's not necessarily to the benefit of the workers, but they are often seen as part of the family. They're part of the productive unit. In Brazil, we see this radical alienation of land, labor and crops. So for example, one farm is not tied to a piece of land if they get a better offer for another piece of land in another state, even they might pick things up, sell the land in that original state and move to the other piece of land. So it's based on economic potential, basically the piece of land crops. You know, if you plant a coffee tree or coco tree, you're tied to producing that crop for foreseeable future. If you plant something like soybeans or cotton, soybeans is an annual crop. Cotton is perennial, but they plant, they grow it as an annual crop. Potential. Essentially, you can respond quickly to the market. You can respond quickly to the climate. So you can pull these things out and replace the crops with something else. There's no attachment from the farmer to that crop. In my work in Bolivia, the farmers were identified as chemo farmers. They identified with the production they were doing, and they took a lot of pride in growing that particular crop. You see the same thing in Iowa with corn farmers, or in Craig gathering 10s work in in Paraguay, you see it with soy farmers there. But here, nobody identifies as a corn farmer or swipe a farmer. They are just a farmer, and they'll produce what sells, essentially, and then with labor, these farmers are essentially working in the office. They're doing investor reports, they're dealing with government regulations. They're hiring and firing workers. The actual labor force isn't family, but it's, you know, workers from the surrounding community, and they're very easily, they're expected not to stay with the farm more than one to three seasons. So there's a real high turnover of those farm workers, and there's no real connection there. So all these things together. Mean the farmer can respond quickly to market changes. They can. You know, when cotton was down a couple years during my research, they would shut down their cotton gym, which meant 6060, jobs were cut, essentially, so they could respond quickly. But there's, of course, limits to this model. So even though the land is flexible, you still have to deal with the particularities of that soil. So in the sahado of Brazil, you have to add a lot of organic matter. You have a lot of a lot of nitrogen. You have to deal with acidic soils, plant cover crops, all those kind of things that they didn't have to do in their farms in Iowa or Illinois, where black soils really fertile soils. So they had to deal with that with workers, they had to deal with really strong government regulations to protect workers in Brazil. And with crops, you still have to deal with pests that come up, especially if you're playing the same thing year after year in the same field. So there's ways that they're still limited in their flexibility, but their the intention is to be free of connection, free of being coupled to to production methods. And you're seeing this, I think, you know, at the end of my research, I saw, or while I was writing this book, I saw a post from a land agency in Illinois, and they were saying, you know, they're moving their land sales, their auctions online during COVID. And they said a huge benefit was, of this was that farmers couldn't see who was outbidding them. They couldn't see who was taking that piece of land. So they're talking about the benefits of being virtual is that people couldn't be so connected to the land. Nobody knew who was buying that piece of land. I think also we're going to see with climate change intensifying, it's going to be the farmers who have capital and the mindset of moving who can buy land where it's now productive to plant corn and soybeans, whereas farmers who don't have that capital are not going to have that option, or people who have the capital but prefer to be on their piece of land that they've been on for generations. Wow,

that's a huge shift. Yeah, yeah, this move where the crop, what? Whatever the hot crop is that you can make the most money. You move there, and then you exchange the workers. You're it's like a management approach to farming. And then the workers are interchangeable. I guess,

very much so. Everything is interchangeable. You know, there's nothing that is essential to the farm besides the farmer, it's really focusing on the career of the farmer rather than any of these things being in a relationship with each other.

Wow, wow. So, so these are the, these are the types of folks that you interviewed, and you said that initially, well, like that you got the some of the locals that didn't have the nicest things to say about them, but then when you talk to them, you said that they really wanted to tell their story. And so you have some interesting characters in your book. Tell, tell us one or a couple of some of your favorite stories from what you heard from these folks. Yeah,

I'll tell I've got a couple stories if you have time. So first of all, so my first stage of research was with these family farmers in Bahia. Second stage was in goy ice with the Mennonites. And at one point during my research with the Mennonites, I needed to go to Brasilia to do an interview, so I was going to take the bus. I got on the bus, and there was a couple, a white elderly couple, on the bus. They're dressed like they're on a safari. So I thought, probably American. I didn't say anything, because it was my break. I had a couple hours on the bus. I was just going to take a nap and relax. They got on the bus, and they're having an argument with another passenger about where the buckets went or something, and they couldn't speak any Portuguese, and the other passenger couldn't speak in English. So after a couple minutes, I thought, Okay, I need to do something here. So I helped out, I translated, and we figured that situation up. But 15 minutes later, the elderly couple was like, Where are you from? Though, I think it just clicked that they were hearing English. I don't think they even thought about it. And I told them, and they asked why I was there. And so I was told I was doing research, and they had been coming back from Mato Grosso, which is further to the west, where another American farmer is out there, and they come out once a year to help out with a harvest, and then they go back to their home. And then he started asking about the people I was talking to. And so I mentioned, you know, who I was working with and who I was talking to. And he went into talking about, you know, such and such farmer should be in jail. And he said, another farmer, I can't believe no one's killed that. Person yet, and another farmer saying, this is actually a good guy. He just doesn't know he's doing all this kind of stuff. Really just went off on all the different rumors, all the different stories about these different farmers. And that is really gives you a little taste of how this community worked. So it's not a community that's based on connection, and shared interest, but rather competition, antagonism. They're competing all the time for investors and for investment money and for land. So it's this is just a taste of how these rumors are kind of spread. The other story, similarly, was my first Thanksgiving in Brazil, and I had two competing invitations for Thanksgiving, one from this kind of this character. It was kind of a classic ethnographic character. There was always, when you do ethnography, there's always one person in the community who's a little bit of an outsider but wants to talk, and it's just very genuine and very friendly, and you can get a lot of information from that person, but also it's nice to talk to those kind of people. So he invited me, but then another group in the community also invited me to their Thanksgiving. So I talked to my first friend and explained to you know, there's an opportunity to see all these other farmers interact with each other. I feel like I need to go to the other Thanksgiving party. So I went there. They couldn't find Turkey. They found a big chicken. They said a big chicken. And it was just fascinating to see these farmers, who have 10s of 1000s of hectares of land in Brazil have managed all this capital. And this was really a moment where I thought, these are just people who I know from my community. You know, they they talk about the same things. They're watching American football. They were talking about this one other farmer who was out of the country because he was under investigation, and talking about how he could throw the football over the house, that kind of thing. So this is really pivotal moment for me, and in seeing that, first of all, that I had to choose a Thanksgiving party to go to. There wasn't a joint Thanksgiving party. But also feeling like these are just regular people, these are just regular North Americans, and there's nothing to be to be worried about after that was a lot easier to do the research. Nice,

nice. Did any of them share, like, their like, a unique story of, you know, the trials and tribulations of coming from the Midwest or Brazil? Like, what were some of the culture shocks or crazy stories you might have heard, I think,

you know, a lot of my research was really patient, slow conversations in cars and pickups going from from the city to people's farms. So there's one story where a farmer took me to his farm in Poe actually, which is a little ways north of Bahia. And on the way, we stopped by and saw basically a charcoal field. They said another American farmer had created illegally. And then we stopped by the land court. The court specifically is set up to manage land disputes. And he told me about all the kind of tribulations of going to the land court over and over and having deliver this paperwork and this other paperwork, and having it signed, and this kind of thing. And really demonstrated to me, like how much work went into that office, work that they're always talking about, and how much their job really is making sure a piece of paperwork is filed, making sure a piece of paperwork is received by somebody. And then later on that trip, we went to a farm that he managed for a Belgian investor. And there we saw they hadn't been paid for several weeks. And so he kind of tried to help figure out that situation, and gave them permission to butcher some kettle that were on the farm, that kind of thing. And then I heard, you know, he has another farm that is mostly like a Banana Farm, and it's managed by an ex MST landless movement worker in Brazil. And this fascinating conversation about how, you know, he was against MST completely. They thought he thought they were thieves and addicted to drugs and all those kind of things that you hear from all the other farmers, Brazilian farmers, as well. But they said, if I was in this situation, I'd be doing the same thing as they are. So really seeing that complexity and seeing that what these farmers do on a daily basis is going from site to site, putting out fires, making sure paperwork is filed, that kind of thing. So it's not, you know, they're not, they're not driving tractors and they're not driving combines. They're they're driving around and trying to put out fires and trying to figure out situations.

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Wow. Wow. Well, thanks. Thanks so much for sharing all this and doing this, this deep research into into this field, I guess pun intended. What I find fascinating is, you know, you come into a field of research and there's, you know, the word on the street is, is one thing, and then when actually you go deeper, it's clearly something else. And then you find that, you know, everyone's just trying to do the best that they can, and that, you know, don't necessarily trust conventional wisdom, I guess, on things, but this. But what is also really fascinating is that, just as with everything in the world, things are constantly changing. This whole idea of flexible farming, that's that's really something I never heard of before, and I think it's really fascinating to learn more about. And I would encourage anyone that wants to learn more about the folks that that bring the food to your table, uh, farmers and around the world, I would strongly encourage you to read Andrew's new book. Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado.. Thank you so much for joining us. Andrew.

All right. Thank you, Jonathan.

That was Andrew Ofstehage, author of the new book. Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado.. If you would like to purchase Andrew's new book, use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu if you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank You for Listening to 1869 The Cornell University Press podcast.