BACKGROUND

Preoccupied with both the medium and long-term environmental monitoring of small farms in the Amazônia, a team of researchers from Embrapa NMA, the Brazilian Agency of Agricultural Research (Embrapa), and the non-governmental organization ECOFORÇA - Research & Development, decided to create a project which would follow a significant number of rural properties over a 100 year period.  In the long term, it is believed that this project will produce a series of descriptive data regarding the properties capable of generating sustainable agriculture indicators. This should also generate a referential on productions costs, the performance of diverse types of cultivation, the true influence of public policies on the region in terms of promotion, assistance, researching, financing, etc., and on how these local systems reach to such externalities. The monitoring of the system's sensitivity to such factors should provide information over the possible consequences of the links between the micro level (local strategies) and macro level (public policies) for the sustainability of small agriculture in the Amazônia.

This study breaks away from the hypothesis that small farmers, gambling on their own luck, are living in the Amazônia as one gigantic multilocal and multifactoral agricultural experience.  Compared to experimental field research, an infinite number of combinations and intervals between coffee, cacao, rubber, and annual cultures, for example, are being tested for tens of thousands of properties in Rondônia.  The same value are used for each to account for all the possible dimensions of agricultural production systems, such as: working the land, handling of organic substance, control techniques for disease, rotations, crop spatial dispositions, etc.

Successes and failures are being evaluated empirically and validated by the farmers, following the same itinerary that guaranteed almost tens of thousands of sedentary agriculture.  Posed by the researchers in the project's design was the question: why not detect, among the small farmers from Rondônia, the main successes and examples capable of representing a social and environmental advancement?  If the identification and the evaluation of these more sustainable systems of production demand time and perseverance, this research took care of to these requirements.

The research was initiated approximately 10 years ago in the region of Machadinho d'Oeste, in Northeastern Rondônia, with the objective of better understanding the agricultural transformations of the Amazônia and its consequences, thanks to the methods being generated in this case study.  Despite the great political- administrative instability of Brasil, thanks to the most varied institutional structures with diverse partners, close to 450 small agricultural properties have been followed annually by satellite imagery and each three years through field surveys.