La Aurora: A New Dawn

This is an exclusive English translation of an article that originally appeared in Periódico MU no. 79, from August.

Is it possible to work the land in an efficient and profitable way without agrochemicals or fertilisers? An agro-ecological establishment in Buenos Aires province shows its crops, cattle, and results. Through the alliance between the producer and agronomist, we see a new paradigm, proving it’s possible to be independent of the genetically modified model and achieve healthy agriculture.

Producer Juan Kiehr and agricultural engineer Eduardo Cerdá on Kiehr’s farm in Benito Juárez

Looking up from the newspaper, the landscape from the window of the coach is an ocean of soy fields, which we are crossing at 90 kmph down Ruta 3, on the way to Benito Juárez, Capital of Friendship, with it’s population of 15,000, 400km south of Buenos Aires. And then to a 650-hectare farm called La Aurora. A different landscape and different words.

There, next to a tractor, with his big hands from working the land, knee-high boots, short-rimmed hat, is 71-year-old Juan Kiehr, a producer who has conceived an almost-epic project at this point in history: to live in peace.

The 4×4 and the F100

Juan Kiehr’s F100

Juan Kiehr is the grandson of Danes, cordial and hospitable, with a tendency for perseverance: he married once, more than 40 years ago, to Erna Bloti, a Swiss woman with whom he has two daughters. He doesn’t drive a vulgar 4×4, but a F100 which is 47 years old and has visited an unknown number of worlds, as the odometer broke a long time ago. “And if I have to travel, I use the Megane, which is a gem.”

In the F100 we reach a hilltop from where we can see the farm in perspective. In his cracked and serene voice he says: “This was my father’s. I took over in 1981 when he passed away. During the first years I followed the trend, like any other producer. But with time, above all during the past 15 or 20 years, I have seen what agrochemicals do to the soil, and that, combined with the statistics of what is being used in Argentina, is a scary thing.”

He is not trying to convince anybody, just telling his story. “I thought: I don’t want to leave a corpse for those who follow me. I want to leave this farm in as good a condition as I found it in, or better. I can’t think of any other way to work.

“I am psychologically allergic to the idea of working with poisons. It’s not that I am afraid to handle them, but I see what they are doing to the soil and to the water, and they are things that are very hard to undo. And I was here with my family. I didn’t want that for the place where we live.

“And on top of it all, those products are really expensive. And they way the lose their effectiveness, so you have to use evermore. It started with two litres per hectare, and now they are on 12 or 14. Spending more, poisoning more, for the same results.”

Kiehr had another elusive dream: live, insofar as possible, without economic shocks. “So that family doesn’t go without. You work as much as you can as it is the role of paternity with responsibility, I think. It’s not the same as saying I’m going fishing, sort yourselves out.”

Heart + profit

Kiehr was mulling over his ideas when he crossed paths with Eduardo Cerdá, an agricultural engineer, who had been a consultant for various producers in the area since 1990, who were organised as a cooperative. The group fell apart for different reasons, deaths (cancer), and different opinions on how to work the land. Since 1997, after the Menem opened the country to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) via the approval of glyphosate requested by Monsanto, Cerdá became Kiehr’s consultant.

Cerdá had studied in La Plata, where he met the agricultural engineer Santiago Sarandón, his professor in the course on cereals. Sarandón had been trying to find a sense in the course and his own career, beyond the stereotype of an agronomist who is reduced to applying recipes and recommending chemical products, and created the first agroecology course in the country, a science which combined agronomy with ecology.

Technical definition: “Agroecology is the application of ecological concepts and principles in the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems. Agroecology uses the natural processes of interactions that are produced on the farm with the aim of reducing the use of external inputs and improving the biological efficiency of the crop system.”

The external inputs are herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers and other inventions of the chemical industry, which created the superstition that it is impossible to work without their widespread use, adding to GM crops like soy, maize, rape, sunflower, cotton, and rice.

Cerdá came with these ideas about agroecology and towards the end of the 90s collided with a terrain that was ever-more flooded with massive fumigations and GM soy monoculture. “The argument of agroecology was theoretical, but not adapted to concrete productive situations, above all in this region.”

Juan Kiehr with his trusted tractor

Meanwhile, Kiehr’s mistrust was fertilised. “Agricultural engineers would come by, who in reality are selling products. Perhaps they didn’t have a choice, but they would sweeten the producer, and lead him like a show cow, give him a hat, talk about technology with the aim of selling products and machines, an entire propaganda apparatus like you can see in Chacra o Clarín Rural.” He opens his hands. “You are a farmer, not an agricultural exploiter. But it is like a vortex and they want to make you feel: you are in the technology that they sell you, or you’ve been left behind. I don’t want to charge anybody for that they do, but it is not true that that is the only option or the best option. An let’s be frank – who is really benefitting from all this? The producer, or the corporations that manufacture and advertise it all?”

On a national level, the Chamber of Agricultural Health and Fertilisers (CASAFE) states that the use of pesticides has risen 858% in the last two decades, whilst the agricultural acreage has risen just 50% and the crop yield 30% (figures from the University Network for Environment and Health). The business that corporations like Syngenta, Bayer, and Monsanto lead means the application of 317m litres of pesticides (including 200m litres of glyphosate) in Argentina during the 2012-13 season, with revenues of US$2.38bn.

Instead, in La Aurora, there were tours around the lots in the F100, talks which harmonised the knowledge Cerdá brought from university with what Kiehr knew about the land. It was not a change from one day to the next, rather from one life to the next. The farm was redesigned agroecologically, by people who were able to combine using their hearts and heads, with their feet on the ground.

The heart, because this is a family farm that Kiehr inherited, loves, and which he will leave to his kin.

The head, because thinking how to manage it in a way that will not impoverish or kill the soil, or be dangerous for living organisms, including humans.

And the feet on the ground, so that this work values the farm instead of bleeding it dry, and allows a production that will also be efficient and profitable.

There remains just one small detail: how is it done?

GM Republic

La Aurora appears as a case study in one of today’s most interesting and shocking wake up calls, which is not yet published but will be freely downloadable: ‘Agroecología: bases teóricas para el diseño y manejo de agroecosistemas sustentables’ (Agroecology: Theoretical bases for the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems). Edited by the La Plata University’s Faculty of Agrarian and Forestry Sciences, it is written by agricultural engineer Santiago Sarandón and his colleague Cecilia Flores, with contributions from other professionals.

A scientific and technical work that studies production, describes new paradigms to understand the rural situation, as well as proposals. For example, Chapter 1 is called ‘The unsustainability of the current agricultural model’.

It highlights, among other problems:

– The dependency on agrochemicals (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilisers).

– Contamination of food, water, soil, and people by pesticides and products derived from the use of chemical fertilisers.

– Development of resistance to pesticides by certain pests and pathogens.

– Loss of productive capability of the soils, due to erosion, degradation, salinisation, and desertification.

– Loss of nutrients in the soils.

– Loss of biodiversity.

– Contribution to global warming and decrease in the ozone layer.

– The problem of rural poverty has not been resolved.

The last chapter is dedicated to La Aurora, and was written by Sarandón and Flores along with Cerdá himself, in his dual role as agronomist and Kiehr’s farm consultant. There, the situation of the Pampas is explained, where cattle has been replaced by crops that are dependent on toxic inputs, costs have risen, and medium-scale family producers have been expelled: in 20 years, the number of agricultural establishments has halved in the region, concentrating land ownership in fewer hands. Against this backdrop, the question arises: how did they manage to find a model that is efficient without agrotoxins, so much so that now even scientific books are describing it?

The art of redesign

The Kiehr’s home is the heart of the farm

The house is spacious, beautiful, warm. It is not “country style”, but Juan-Erna style. There’s wooden furniture that they brought from Chaco, a living room with bookshelves and family mementos, LCD and video player, a wood burner for Winter, and a large kitchen which makes this house a home. There is a second house for guests. Kiehr speaks proudly of his daughters: Teresa is a doctor and Sara a physiotherapist. Both are married, and they have given him three grandchildren. Sara lives in Germany, and the family tend to visit her there every year. He has an almost pictorial view of the countryside: “I’m surrounded by soy operations. It’s all nature, but dead. There are not even birds.”

While Kiehr serves the mate, Cerdá explains: “The moment arose when we were talking with Juan about the design of the production. For example, there was a lot of sunflower, but Juan suggested changing it.” Kiehr: “We did it for years with herbicides that we put down before the crops grew. But they left the ground dusty, strange. Then the slugs came and we had to spray again, and again for the weeds, and again for pests such as grubs, until I said: enough. I decided to throw myself into cattle farming.” La Aurora has 297 hectares for crops, and 334 (hills and valleys) which are more suitable for cattle.

They eliminated the sunflower almost entirely and began working the work of consolidating the cattle (breeding and wintering), as a basis for the re-launch of the farm’s production, but without chemicals. Cerdá: “The cattle did not make as much profit as the crops, but it worked as a great base and compliment to rethink the production of wheat, oats, barley, and sorghum, not dependent on inputs.”

Outline and Achievements

The agroecology applied in La Aurora, in a few lines:

– Healthy, free cattle, fed on natural grasses, with calves that reach 500kg and are sold as steers for export, which feed the ground with dung and urine. They have between 600 and 700 heads. Kiehr strategically installed 25 drinking troughs (around which the animals will naturally defecate) to cover the entire farm.

– As such, the ground is strengthened, enriched, fertilised, and better retains moisture and nutrients. And whilst feedlots are surrounded by the stench of rot in which the animals live, in La Aurora there is never a smell of dung.

– The plantations are done with intercropping, legumes such as red clover, which helps avoid the growth of weeds and fasten nitrogen, a fundamental nutrient for the soil. As such the polyculture has avoided the use of fertilisers since 2001.

– The nourished and vital soil, added to the systems which allow the natural habitat of insects which, also, bring benefits to the ecosystem, means there is no need for herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, or chemical fertilisers.

It is easier to write this than do it, but the result (see the graph, below) is that without counting the profit made by the cattle, Kiehr obtains almost the same yield from the crops as neighbouring farms (10% less), but with much lower costs: US$300 a month less per hectare in the case of wheat. In the 80 hectares that he is cultivating today, that saving represents US$24,000, and also saves the earth, the water, and the deluge of ever less useful poisons, and chemicals which fertilise little and badly: just two or three nutrients, versus the 16 found in La Aurora’s natural process. Without those nutrients that plants are weak (although drugged by fertilisers) and as such become victims of fungi and disease, which means more fungicides and chemicals are needed, an eternal merry-go-round that benefits you know who.

Kiehr avoids all of this, covers his costs quickly, spends less, obtains almost the same, but healthily and without artificial stimulants, and has a greater profit (US$762 per hectare versus US$549 using a conventional system), as well as a better return: the farm returns US$5.15 for every dollar invested, against the US$1.13 recovered by a conventional producer.

Cerdá: “If the system works with GMOs and agrotoxins, it is because of its enormous inefficiency, and because an unnatural, corporate logic reigns, like that of a drug addict, based in the chemistry and the money. We aim for healthy agriculture that re-establishes the biological processes, doesn’t degrade resources, and is efficient in terms of production. It is a view to become independent, to not be tied to a model that poisons and impoverishes.”

The chart shows the advantages that agroecology (yellow) has over more traditional farming methods (black and white), listing (L-R) differences in yield, profit, direct costs, yield needed to cover costs, and return per dollar invested.

How it works

The farm uses its own seeds. Cerdá: “How are you going to patent something that is alive, as the labs aim to do? Even if you have changed a gene? It all goes to show that GMs are not good for the country, its citizens or producers. Food is a plant’s main asset, destined to be consumed by butterflies, caterpillars, pests which we consume without knowing the side-effects or its capacity to evolve. These seeds and transgenes do not help the producer, they only indebt them, and end up leading to an extraction in the richness of the soil which we then give away through the export of the grain for animals and oils, above all to China.”

Kiehr adds: “And it’s not true that it’s to feed the world, because there is more than enough food. The problem is that they are badly distributed. This is done purely for commercial interest. And the Seed Law, for Monsanto, makes me think of Colombia: people can’t keep their own seeds, it’s illegal, they burn them if they are not the ones that the corporations have sold them. I find it hard to believe that the government will push through such a conservative law, but they also do good things with the IPAF (Institute for Small Family Agriculture): it’s contradictory, I don’t know if this is a right-wing government disguised as leftist but, of course, I could be wrong.”

The agroecology applied in this farm also allows for the growth in cattle stock, more efficient fattening, and real stability in the production (95 tonnes per year). In the biggest drought of the last 70 years (2008/9), 15,000 heads of cattle died due to a lack of food in the region. But La Aurora suffered no losses, thanks to the ground and the way the crops had been worked, they resisted the debacle.

Is agroecology related to organic? Cerdá: “Organic producers in this region are following the same conventional model, just without pesticides.” The “organic” certification ends up being a supposedly healthy niche of the same fumigated market, but at prohibitively high prices. “When I see them, they talk about what deal they’ve done, how much they’ve made, but they never talk about the soil, how to work it. Their farms are good, but they yield much less than La Aurora [1,000kg of wheat per hectare against 5,000kg], and they use chemical fertilisers, which is like drugging the plants to make them look good, with products that prejudice the biosystem of the soil, and drain towards the underground wells generating contamination and toxicity due to nitrates and nitrites. You buy a crispy, colourful lettuce but because of those fertilisers you don’t know what ill effects it could bring you. Organic is not looking at things in an agroecological way.”

Juan is partially driven by the desire to leave a healthy, working business for his family

Capital and motivation

“It is important to highlight that the technologies that were used in this farm can be easily appropriated by producers, given that there are no large capital investments needed, it is more about the engineering, about an advisor-producer compliment and the motivation that is generated by understanding what you are designing and managing,” says the Sarandón-Flores book in the chapter about La Aurora, highlighting that the results achieved “show the potential for this focus to be applied in extensive systems [read: large farms] of temperate climate like those in the Argentine Pampa region.”

Continuing the mate, Cerdá says: “Juan was able to live without shocks, his daughters were able to study, travel, and although some see his F100 as a sign of poverty, Juan doesn’t own a 4×4 as he is not interested in inventing costs to lower his how much he is taxed on his profits, nor is he interested in the costs that owning a 4×4 would entail. He is on top of his taxes, and the entire farm is run legitimately, by the book”. Kiehr adds another feat: “I have never had to take out a loan.”

The INTA and other entities started to approach him, sometimes in a strange way, and they have been obliged to say agroecology more regularly. The visitors get excited, like when they visit Guadalupe Norte, Santa Fe: the Vénica family’s Naturaleza Viva farm.

At La Plata University’s Faculty of Agriculture, Kiehr and Cerdá had a public of 400 students. “It makes me feel very good,” says Kiehr, as if resuming what his wife Erna calls the wonder years. They met in Chaco at the start of the 70s, her as a nurse and him as a member of the Lutheran church, both collaborating with the Qom community, then called Toba. “The work changed me,” says Kiehr. “I understood what it meant to not have so many things, but to be more of a person. When I returned it took me a while to adjust. My neighbours would spend time speaking badly about this person or that, and I felt an emptiness. I am happy now, doing something that makes me feel useful, connected with other people. I am thankful for them, and they changed my life.”

Chinese News

Cerdá brings up a new subject: “In Rosario I’m working with soy producers, who are starting to move away from the GM path. They can’t do it overnight, like an addict it’s impossible to be cured from one day to the next, but they are starting to be convinced that it is feasible.”

Maybe its sheer caution: in China the publication known in the West as Science & Technology Abstracts Newspaper, from the Ministry of Science and Technology, published an article in April which reflects the official preoccupation for the consequences of mass consumption over two decades of foods that are by-products of GM soy (animal fodder and oil), which contain glyphosate, which starts to be tied to birth defects, rises in the cases of cancer, many of them unusual, infertility, and other illnesses. ‘We must face the harm caused to 1.3bn Chinese by imported GM soy’, is the title of the article by Mi Zhen-yu, Air Marshal and former vice president of the Military Science Academy, among other things.

Hypothesis: if in China, the world’s principal consumer of these things, they are realising the same things that the rural towns close to the fumigations, producers such as Kiehr, or scientists such as the late Andrés Carrasco came to understand, it is possible that a large change in this story is being sown. Perhaps one day, as Sarandón thought, agroecology will be the name of all agriculture.

Meanwhile, Cerdá is advising a neighbour’s farm in Benito Juárez, belonging to documentary filmmaker Valeria Mapelman, who in just two years made her own reconversion to agroecology, which is turning out to be more profitable that she had hoped, making more than she would have made leasing it to poole planting, who enter the business until they fly vulture-like towards other bubbles.

The birds have returned to the farm.

Kiehr smiles.

And so it’s possible to hear the silence whilst looking towards the horizon with your feet on the ground.

What is being designed in La Aurora is a novelty: as its name indicates, perhaps it also means the breaking of a new dawn.

Translation by Kristie Robinson

lavaca.org is a communications co-operative founded in 2001, and produces a web page, monthly magazine MU, and radio programmes that can be reproduced freely. Our home is the cultural centre ‘MU Punto de Encuentro’, at Hipólito Yrigoyen 1440, Congreso, Buenos Aires.

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