Direct Planting: 50 years since the beginning of the system that boosted Brazilian Agriculture

During the football world cup season it is worth remembering. In 1970, the Brazilian team won its third world football championship, and there was a song that began with: “...90 million in action, forward Brazil, save the team”. At that time, despite being a giant by nature, a continental country, Brazil was a food importer.

Today, the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine has unbalanced the agricultural input chain worldwide, compromising the necessary volumes of grains and consequently increasing their values. Food security has become a global political issue. Increasing food production turned on the red light in several countries. Many do not have land resources for their production, others basically need to increase the efficiency of land use in a sustainable way, which is not a very simple task.

Historically, the first agricultural revolution included the domestication of wheat, rice, cattle, chickens, and bread yeast. The second came with the industrial revolution, which made it possible to mechanize preparation and planting services. And in a third stage, driven by the development of fertilizers, pesticides and cultivation of improved varieties, such as wheat, which are much more productive, which was called the “green revolution”. The feat earned agricultural engineer Dr. Norman Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, just in time to feed an expanding human population. We live in times of such rapid and constant change that we do not reflect much on the meanings of concepts that affect our lives on a daily basis.

New Brazilian farmers began to arrive here in the late 1800s, due to the need to replace slave labor after abolition. These immigrants were mostly descendants of Europeans, where they learned that in order to sow or plant a new crop, soil preparation was necessary. This preparation consisted of, after rain, in the summer, deep plowing to turn over and prepare the bed for the seed, for planting. This preparation consumes a lot of working time, and many machine hours, in addition to exposing the soil to the erosion process.

History tells us that in the early 60s, an American rural producer, Harry Young Jr, in the state of Kentucky, made the first planting without cultivating the soil. In Brazil, at the beginning of the 70s, technicians from the former ICI (Companhia Imperial de Indústria Química do Brasil, today Syngenta) worked on research with the herbicide paraquat, at Fazenda Veseroda, in Rolândia, where they carried out the first demonstration and extension of a new system with farmers in northern Paraná. The observation, by farmer Herbert Bartz, of planting plots without initial soil preparation, with wheat crops installed in Londrina, in 1971, aroused his interest. In 1972, he installed the first crops of this new planting system at Fazenda Rhenania, which he owns. Thus, the first work began on a form of planting without initial soil preparation, called direct planting. Soil preparation is replaced by an application of herbicides, which eliminates the vegetation present, forming a mulch on the surface, where the new crop is sown. In this decade, several new products were launched on the market, including glyphosate, which would facilitate this operation. Several years passed since the first experience on Bartz's farm, with a lot of insistence, a lot of giving up and a lot of persistence, until this new system was used on a large scale. This pioneering farmer is today deservedly recognized as the “father of direct planting in Brazil”.

The direct planting system (SPD) is centered on the technological basis of not disturbing the soil (minimum movement in the planting line), crop rotation and the presence of mulch on the soil, which minimizes erosion and, thus, promotes increasing productivity and environmental sustainability. It can also be defined as a set of agricultural practices in which the seed is placed in a furrow in the soil, if possible with the presence of mulch, in which herbicides are used to eliminate weeds, without disturbing the soil, making -suitable for sowing new crops, minimizing erosion risks. Permanent soil coverage by plants or plant residues is considered one of the foundations of SPD, in fact, what is seen on the floor of a forest. Sustainable soil management allows for a series of benefits, including the maintenance of its quality, water resources, local biodiversity, as well as gains in competitiveness, the reduction of time spent on implementing the new crop and machine hours needed. As they do not require prior soil preparation, they allow for new planting immediately after harvesting the crop, a technique that allows in tropical Brazil the possibility of planting two to three crops per year in the same area, which became known as the summer crop. , off-season and winter harvest.

In Brazil, it is still common to create controversy, notably against agribusiness, as occurs with agricultural pesticides, dubbed 'poison' by environmental activists, who are unaware not only of how the food chain works, as well as what processes are used to the abundant production that keeps everyone's table free of bacteria harmful to human health.

It must be considered that in tropical environments, with high temperatures and favorable humidity, such as those that occur in our country, these threats to agriculture are frequent and devastating. The use of pesticides provides greater productivity per unit area, which results in greater crop yield. These products allow the implementation and maintenance of direct planting systems, as well as the cultivation of two to three crops or agricultural cycles per year. This is an intelligent use of land, as it makes it possible to produce three times in the same area, eliminating the need to incorporate new areas.

Few countries in the world can achieve this feat. Production systems conducted using direct planting require less infrastructure and human labor, consume less fossil energy, reduce erosion, require lower doses of correctives and fertilizers and also favor the integrated management of pests, diseases and weeds. Therefore, at the same time as they improve the quality of soil, water and air, they allow us to produce more in a sustainable way, providing food security and decarbonization at the same time and enabling an increase in income generated by agriculture, according to survey by Embrapa (2020).

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in less than 30 years, by 2050, global food demand is expected to increase by 70%. Therefore, we must leave aside ideological discourse and recognize the reality of our agriculture, which is efficient and respectful of the environment. This unrealistic speech greatly depreciates our agriculture and our country on the world stage. Farmers are actually unsung heroes in environmental preservation, protecting more than 20% of the area on their properties as a legal reserve.

According to Carvalho (Agroanalys, 2022), “Brazilian agriculture, for many years in the reigning ideology of social experiences, received constant criticism for not adding value to its exports. Exposed to competition, against protectionism and subsidies, agriculture grew, flourished and bears the fruits that feed the complex Brazilian economy. In our tropical world, it is the process of crop intensification that gives extraordinary impetus to productivity gains and the improvement of the so-called biota (life) of tropical soils and, at the same time, it is what allows the recovery of lands degraded by land use. of adapted technology, the mitigation of carbon emissions and the generation of jobs and decentralized income in Brazil”.

And today, with the next football world cup about to start, with a population of 215 million, with the use of a sustainable tropical technology developed here by science and with the entrepreneurship and courage of rural producers in incorporating it, the Brazil produces food for more than a billion people, in just over 10% of its territory. Among these technologies, the adoption of the “Direct Planting System” stands out, which exceeds 45 million hectares cultivated, placing the country as one of the champions of exports in various segments of agriculture, to more than 150 nations. Brazilian producers, despite setbacks with the difficulty of making basic inputs available and with high prices, demonstrate, and continue to demonstrate, their contribution to the country's food security. It is worth mentioning that we left a production of just over 40 million tons in 1970, in an area of ​​30 million hectares, to 300 million tons in around 75 million hectares planted today. In a world with climate change and extreme droughts threatening global food security, here, in our Brazil, there was a huge leap in the history of agriculture, in just 50 years.

Luiz Lonardoni Foloni, Advisor to CCAS (Sustainable Agro Scientific Council)