Building Soil Fertility: Embrapa and the Agronomic Development for the “Conquest” of the Brazilian Cerrado (1975-95)

Abstract

The history of agricultural intervention in the extensive area currently called the “Cerrado biome” reflects the confluence of several projects involving public and private agencies, which brought together knowledge from agronomy, economics, environmental sciences and other areas over decades. The biggest challenge for this venture revolved around converting large areas of “naturally” infertile soils into arable land for large-scale agriculture. A decisive point in the “conquest of the Cerrado”, as advocates of large-scale agribusiness refer to this historic process, was the creation of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária-Embrapa) and its specific unit for this area, the Cerrado Agricultural Research Center (Centro de Pesquisa Agropecuária dos Cerrados-CPAC). The institution has coordinated the research on cerrado soil fertility since the mid-1970s, promoting important scientific advances in agricultural productivity in Brazil. This article observes from a historiographical perspective how the Embrapa reports from 1975 to 1995 produced an important range of knowledge about cerrado soils and ecology, which ultimately led to the conceptualization and construction of the “Cerrado Biome”.