Land-saving approaches and beef production growth in Brazil

By G. B. Martha, E. Alves, E. Contini. 2012

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increased food production can be achieved by incorporating more land into the productive process, by increasing productivity in already opened areas or by a combination of both strategies. By allowing a fraction of current pasture area to accommodate the expansion of food and biofuel crops intensification of existing pastoral systems is a strategy to avoid further loss of native vegetation. However, there is a common misperception that the path of growth of the Brazilian beef production has been primarily based on the expansion of extensive pastures. Empirical evidence presented in this article shows that whilst this was the case for the 1950–1975 period, the pattern of cattle production in Brazil has changed profoundly since then. During the 1950–2006 period productivity gains explained 79% of the growth in beef production in Brazil and supported a land-saving effect of 525 million hectares. Therefore, without this land-saving effect an additional pasture area that is 25% higher than the Amazon biome in Brazil would be needed to meet current levels of Brazilian beef production.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00a9607dd4cc484bfd837d8b2f26a7736ec822df

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Mario Herrero

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Climate change mitigation through livestock system transitions (2014, background): “For instance, in Brazil, one of the epicenters of land-use change, 79% of beef production growth between 1950 and 2006 came from productivity gains which in turn saved 525 Mha of land (18).”