The Safrinha Subpoena, or, Do They that Soy the Wind Ripen the Whirlwind?

August 13, 2019

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Today we’re going to relate a detective story which begins with an unexplained and foul stink, and branches off into climate, trade, the eradication of poverty, crop rotation, the politics of the Amazon, the flow vectors of tropical seas, seafloor convection, the future of beach tourism, what gets fertilized and when in soy corn crop rotations, and dietary shift. Just to name a few threads of the conversation.

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Our starting point is sargassum, a family of macroalgae that have been piling up on American, African, Mexican and Caribbean shorelines in huge quantities in recent years — as much as 20 million tons a year, which is like the weight of all the cars in California.

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When it finds shore, it piles up, rots, and releases foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas (yep, rotten egg smell), and it’s been rotting so much and so fast that it has become a financial and quality of life downer for tourist havens and seaside communities.

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The Science researchers found that:

The expansion of the sargassum coincides with two key events in the spring and summer. In the Amazon’s rain forest, the continued deforestation by farmers has led to an increase in the amount of nutrient pollution flowing out to sea from the Amazon River. Meanwhile a regular upwelling current from the ocean’s depths pushes nutrients that had been on the bottom up to the surface to further fuel the seaweed’s growth.

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The 6 Unexplainables of the Round Up the Usual Suspects approach

For there are a couple of mysteries to unravel. Namely:

1. The suddenness problem. The sargassum bloomed explosively since 2011, not before, yet deforestation is a gradual rather than a one-year phenomenon. And, we might add, in the years around 2007-10, Amazonian deforestation was in sharp retreat as government stepped in to curtail it. It’s worth adding that during the years 2006-2009 the Brazilian soy acreage dropped by hundreds of thousands of hectares. Harvests were plunging, not spiking.

2. The land use problem. There’s precious little forest that is ever converted directly to agriculture, usually it is converted to pastureland, which is not given large doses of fertilizers in the north of Brazil.

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3. The nitrogen problem. ... no one applies nitrogen to soybeans; soybeans fix nitrogen from the air.

4. The time problem. The sargassum is blooming in the northern hemisphere spring and summer, as noted above, but soybean planting in Mato Grosso usually starts in September — that’s a long gap of 7-8 months between a fertilizer application and run-off into the rivers.

5. The current problem. Items of any sort drifting out of the Amazon River don’t usually end up on the beaches of Florida and Mexico, anyway.

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6. The Amazon problem. There’s a difference between what most people would regard as the Amazonian rainforest and the Amazon River watershed. The state of Mato Grosso, BTW FYI ICYMI and just sayin’, has four different river systems and watersheds, and most of the cropland is in the south of the state in the Parana or Tocantins watersheds. An algae bloom associated with nitrogen run-off that shows up seven months after a nitrogen application would more likely show up in Buenos Aires or Guyana, as opposed to the mouth of the Amazon.

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Where’s our smoking gun, that pops up explosively around 2010, and is deeply associated with nitrates?

Safrinha, and a well-intentioned shift in ag policy

You may well find that the answer lies not in deforestation but a halt in deforestation and a shift in Brazilian agricultural policy to emphasize land use intensification.

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And you might have not heard much about Safrinha, but you are about to.

That’s a second harvest. It’s usually around February in Mato Grosso state, it’s been encouraged in order to increase incomes for farmers without more land conversion. What have they been planting? In the north of Mato Grosso, it’s been corn. And lately, cotton.

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As Soybean and Corn Advisor reported:

Virtually all of the corn produced in Mato Grosso is safrinha production planted after the first crop of soybeans is harvested.

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Farmtario.com reports:

“Fifteen years ago, most corn was summer corn planted in October and harvested in January,” explained KWS corn breeder Luiz Pires during a visit to the company’s Cambé research station in Paranà. “Now, it is soy planted first, and then corn that is harvested in July and August.” More than 70 per cent of Brazil’s corn is now safrinha and an extra 200,000 hectares of corn are expected over the next five years, Pires said. That’s because cattle farmers are starting to rotate commodity crops through their degraded pastures as a way of boosting soil health, fertility and water-holding capacity.

The Big Shift to Corn

Now, why could that relate back to algae blooms? Again, leaning on Soybean and Corn Advisor:

The safrinha corn crop now represents more than 70% of Brazil’s total corn production and it is the safrinha crop that provides the vast majority of Brazil’s corn exports. The full-season corn crop is primarily planted in southern Brazil and it goes to the domestic livestock industry.

Corn needs nitrogen, that leads to nitrates, some of that might leach into the Amazonian system, where a sargassum nursery has developed. And note those above average precipitations and extended rainy seasons, that drives up the leaching effect.

Climate change, experts believe, may well have produced the other impact.

As our friends at The New Republic reported:

Lew Gramer, a marine scientist at the University of Miami, has also described a possible “correlation” between climate change and Sargassum’s spread due to changes in ocean circulation.

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A remarkable combination of climate change (the shift in the currents) and a well-intentioned response to climate change (the shift in Brazilian agricultural policy). We might add that a lot of that corn and soy is headed for China, where a dietary shift towards more meat has been shifting global demand for livestock feed.

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It’s not cotton, it’s not corn, it’s not even the inability to foresee the macro consequences of local actions. It’s about developing technology to use waste residues as a natural part of developing applications that result in waste residues. It’s a habit of mind that needs some reinforcement, really — habits drive actions, and actions change the world.

We always say around here that bioeconomy does not begin with crops and land but with waste — it may spread to land and crops if the conditions are right and the stakeholder benefits are broadly and fairly shared. Waste along the beaches of the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands is a fair starting point for innovation.

We don’t have a pollution problem; we have an innovation problem that is leaving a potentially valuable commodity by the side of the road to rot. Let’s use it, that’s bioeconomy. Let’s innovate, that’s the bioeconomy spirit. READ MORE