CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 152Pasture and Agricultural SystemsLivestock Farming and ManagementConservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

Degraded pastures in Brazil: improving livestock production and forest restoration

Open access
Feltran-Barbieri, Rafael, Féres, José Gustavo·2021·Royal Society Open Science
DOI 10.1098/rsos.201854PMC PMC8261223
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Degraded pasture is a major liability in Brazilian agriculture, but restoration and recovery efforts could turn this area into a new frontier to both agricultural yield expansion and forest restoration. Currently, rural properties with larger degraded pasture areas are associated with higher levels of technical inefficiency in Brazil. The recovery of 12 million ha of degraded pastures could generate an additional production of 17.7 million bovines while reducing the need for new agricultural land. Regional identification of degraded pastures would facilitate the targeting of agricultural extension and advisory services and rural credit efforts aimed at fostering pasture recovery. Since only 1% of Brazilian municipalities contain 25% of degraded pastures, focusing pasture recovery efforts on this small group of municipalities could generate considerable benefits. More efficient allocation of degraded and native pastures for meat production and forest restoration could provide land enough to fully comply with its Forest Code requirements, while adding 9 million heads to the cattle inventory. Degraded pasture recovery and restoration is a win–win strategy that could boost livestock husbandry and avoid deforestation in Brazil and has to be the priority strategy of agribusiness sector.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1098/rsos.201854

Cites

5 of 5 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • One practical consequence of that has been the promotion of ineffective solutions such as agricultural intensification.

    “One practical consequence of that has been the promotion of ineffective solutions such as agricultural intensification (see Feltran-Barbieri and Féres, 2021).”

    From Beyond the “supply chain” framing: Cattle ranching as a vanishing mediator of deforestation and dispossession in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon (2026) · cites this paper as Feltran-Barbieri and Féres, 2021

    The Results and discussion section says livestock intensification through pasture recovery would reduce pressure for new agricultural land and make room for reforestation. The Conclusion recommends expanding pasture-recovery programmes to increase productivity. The paper presents this form of intensification as a useful solution, not an ineffective one. (LLM, conf=0.90)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 42

  1. [3]Sartori M, Philippidis G, Ferrari E, Borrelli P, Lugato E, Montanarella L, Panagos P. 2019 A linkage between the biophysical and the economic: assessing the global market impacts of soil erosion. Land Use Policy 86, 299- 312. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.05.014) · DOI
  2. [12]Parente L, Mesquita V, Miziara, F, Baumman, L, Ferreira L. 2019. Assessing the pasturelands and livestock dynamics in Brazil, from 1985 to 2017: a novel approach based on high spatial resolution imagery and Google Earth Engine cloud computing. Remote Sens. Environ. 232, 111303. (10.1016/j.rse.2019.111301) · DOI
  3. [15]Martha Jr GB, Alves E, Contini E. 2012 Land-saving approaches and beef production growth in Brazil. Agric. Syst. 110, 173- 177. (10.1016/j.agsy.2012.03.001) · DOI
  4. [17]Strassburg BBN et al. 2017 Moment of truth for the Cerrado hotspot. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 1, 0099. (10.1038/s41559-017-0099) 28812670 · DOI · Paper page
  5. [18]Van Zanten HHE, Mollenhorst H, Klootwijk CW, van Middelaar CE, de Boer IJM. 2016 Global food supply, land use efficiency of livestock systems. Int. J. Life Cycle Assess. 21, 747- 758. (10.1007/s11367-015-0944-1) · DOI
  6. [19]Kwon HY, Nkonya E, Johnson T, Graw V, Kato E, Kihiu E. 2015 Global estimates of the impacts of grassland degradation on livestock productivity from 2001 to 2011. In Economics of land degradation and improvements: a global assessment for sustainable development (eds E Nkonya, A Mirzabaev, J von Braun). Cham, Switzerland: Springer
  7. [20]Latawiec AE et al. 2017 Improving land management in Brazil: a perspective from producers. Agric. Ecosyst. Environ. 240, 276- 286. (10.1016/j.agee.2017.01.043) · DOI
  8. [22]Belotti F, Daidone S, Ilardi G, Atella V. 2013 Stochastic frontier analysis using Stata. Stata J. Promot. Commun. Stat. Stata 13, 719- 758. (10.1177/1536867X1301300404) · DOI
  9. [24]Calle A. 2020 Partnering with cattle ranchers for forest landscape restoration. Ambio 49, 593- 604. (10.1007/s13280-019-01224-8) 31292911 PMC6965560 · DOI
  10. [25]Carrer MJ, Maia AG, Vinholis MMB, Souza Filho IM. 2020 Assessing the effectiveness of rural credit policy on the adoption of integrated crop-livestock systems in Brazil. Land Use Policy 92, 104468. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104468) · DOI
  11. [26]Gil JDB, Garret R, Berger T. 2016 Determinants of crop-livestock integration in Brazil: evidence from the household and regional levels. Land Use Policy 59, 557- 568. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.09.022) · DOI
  12. [27]Cortner O, Garrett RD, Valentim JF, Ferreira J, Niles MT, Reis J, Gil J. 2019 Perceptions of integrated crop-livestock systems for sustainable intensification in the Brazilian Amazon. Land Use Policy 82, 841- 853. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.01.006) · DOI
  13. [28]de Moraes A, de Faccio Carvalho PC, Anghinoni I, Lustosa SB, de Andrade SE, Kunrath TR. 2014 Integrated crop–livestock systems in the Brazilian subtropics. Eur. J. Agron. 57, 4- 9. (10.1016/j.eja.2013.10.004) · DOI
  14. [29]Salton JC, Mercante FM, Tomazi M, Zanatta JA, Concenço G, Silva WM, Retore M. 2014 Integrated crop-livestock system in tropical Brazil: toward a sustainable production system. Agric. Ecosyst. Environ. 190, 70- 79. (10.1016/j.agee.2013.09.023) · DOI
  15. [30]Bento GP, Schimitt Filho AL, Faita MR. 2020 Sistemas silvipastoris no Brasil: Uma revisão sistemática. Res. Soc. Dev. 9, e7019109016. (10.33448/rsd-v9i10.9016) · DOI
  16. [31]Filho RO, Barioni LG, Hall JAJ, Moretti AC, Fonseca Veloso R, Alexander P, Crespolini M, Moran D. 2017 Sustainable intensification of Brazilian livestock production through optimized pasture restoration. Agric. Syst. 153, 201- 211. (10.1016/j.agsy.2017.02.001) · DOI
  17. [32]Drukker D, Prucha IR, Raciborski R. 2013 A command for estimating spatial-autoregressive models with spatial-autoregressive disturbances and additional endogenous Variables. Stata J. 13, 287- 301. (10.1177/1536867X1301300203) · DOI
  18. [33]Fisher MM, Wang J. 2011 Spatial data analysis: models, methods and techniques. Springer Briefs in Regional Science. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
  19. [36]Nwigwe C, Okoruwa V, Adenegan K, Olajide A. 2016 Technical efficiency of beef cattle production technologies in Nigeria: a stochastic frontier analysis. Afr. J. Agric. Res. 11, 5152- 5161. (10.5897/AJAR2016.11744) · DOI
  20. [37]Qushim B, Gillespie JM, Bhandari BD, Scaglia G. 2018 Technical and scale efficiencies of the U.S. grass-fed beef production: whole-farm and enterprises analyses. J. Agric. Appl. Econ. 50, 408- 428. (10.1017/aae.2018.7) · DOI
  21. [38]Hayek MN, Garrett RD. 2018 Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population. Environ. Res. Lett. 13, 084005. (10.1088/1748-9326/aad401) · DOI
  22. [40]Gatti N, Lema D, Brescia V. 2015 A meta-frontier approach to measuring technical efficiency and technology gaps in beef cattle production in Argentina. Milan, Italy: International Conference of Agricultural Economists.
  23. [41]Sampaio EVSB, Menezes RSC, Sampaio YSB, Freitas ADS. 2017 Sustainable agricultural uses in the Caatinga. In Caatinga (eds JMC Silva, IR Leal, M Tabarelli), pp. 413- 428. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
  24. [42]Seidl AF, Silva JSV, Moraes AS. 2001 Cattle ranching and deforestation in the Brazilian Pantanal. Ecol. Econ. 36, 413- 425. (10.1016/S0921-8009(00)00238-X) · DOI
  25. [43]Oliveira TE, Freitas DS, Gianezini M, Ruviaro CF, Zago D, Mércio TZ, Dias EA, Lampert VN, Barcellos JOJ. 2017 Agricultural land use change in the Brazilian Pampa Biome: the reduction of natural grasslands. Land Use Policy 63, 394- 400. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.02.010) · DOI
  26. [44]Lahsen M, Bustamante MMC, Dalla-Nora EL. 2016 Undervaluing and overexploiting the Brazilian Cerrado at our peril. Environ. Sci. Policy Sustain. Dev. 58, 1- 15. (10.1080/00139157.2016.1229537) · DOI
  27. [45]Silva RFB, Batistella M, Moran EF, Lu D. 2016 Land changes fostering Atlantic forest transition in Brazil: evidence from the Paraíba Valley. Prof. Geogr. 69, 80- 93. (10.1080/00330124.2016.1178151) · DOI
  28. [46]Fearnside PM. 2017 Deforestation of Brazilian Amazon. In Oxford research encyclopedia of environmental science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  29. [47]Barbut M, Alexander S. 2016 Land degradation as a security threat amplifier: the new global frontline. In Land restoration: reclaiming landscapes for a sustainable future (eds Chabay I, Frick M, Helgeson J), pp. 3- 12. Waltham, MA: Elsevier/Academic Press.
  30. [48]Chazdon RL. 2008 Beyond deforestation: restoring forests and ecosystem services on degraded lands. Science 320, 1458- 1460. (10.1126/science.1155365) 18556551 · DOI
  31. [49]Webb NP, Marshall NA, Stringer LC, Reed MS, Chappell A, Herrick JE. 2017 Land degradation and climate change: building climate resilience in agriculture. Front. Ecol. Environ. 15, 450- 459. (10.1002/fee.1530) · DOI
  32. [52]Harfuch L, Nassar AM, Zambianco WM, Gurgel AC. 2016 Modelling beef and dairy sector's productivities and their effects on land use change in Brazil. Rev. Econ. Soc. Rural 54, 281- 324. (10.1590/1234.56781806-947900540205) · DOI
  33. [54]Freitas CO, Silva FF, Braga MJ, Neves MCR. 2020 Rural extension and technical efficiency in the Brazilian agricultural sector. Int. Food Agribusiness Manage. Rev. 24, 215- 232. (10.22434/IFAMR2020.0094) · DOI
  34. [56]Reydon BF, Fernandes VB, Telles TS. 2015 Land tenure in Brazil: the question of regulation and governance. Land Use Policy 42, 509- 516. (10.1016/j.landusepol.2014.09.007) · DOI
  35. [59]Baumol WJ, Oates W. 1988 The theory of environmental policy, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  36. [60]Koyuncu C, Yilmaz R. 2013 Impact of private forest ownership on deforestation and poverty. Qual. Quant. 47, 1657- 1664. (10.1007/s11135-011-9618-7) · DOI
  37. [61]Ostrom E. 2011 Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective actions. 29th print. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  38. [62]Moran EF. 1993 Deforestation and land use in the Brazilian Amazon. Hum. Ecol. 21, 1- 21. (10.1007/BF00890069) · DOI
  39. [63]Alston LJ, Libecap GD, Mueller B. 2000 Land reform policies, the sources of violent conflict, and implications for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 39, 162- 188. (10.1006/jeem.1999.1103) · DOI
  40. [67]Gianetti GW, Ferreira Filho JBS. 2020 O Plano e Programa ABC: uma análise da alocação dos recursos. Rev. Econ. Sociol. Rural 59, e216524. (10.1590/1806-9479.2021.216524) · DOI
  41. [79]Feltran-Barbieri R, Féres JG. 2021 Data from: Degraded pastures in Brazil: improving livestock production and forest restoration. Dryad Digital Repository. (10.5061/dryad.ksn02v740) PMC8261223 34377503 · DOI
  42. [80]Feltran-Barbieri R, Féres JG. 2021 Degraded pastures in Brazil: improving livestock production and forest restoration. Figshare. PMC8261223 34377503

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Feltran-Barbieri, R., & Féres, J. G.
Affiliations
  • World Resources Institute Brazil, Rua Claudio Soares 72, Sala 1510, São Paulo SP 05422-030, Brazil
  • Institute of Applied Economic Research (BR)
ORCID
Venue
Royal Society Open Science
Publisher
The Royal Society
Published
2021-07
Volume
8
Issue
7
Pages
201854
ISSN
2054-5703 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1098/rsos.201854
PMC
PMC8261223
OpenAlex
W3177971612
Cited by
152
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 46 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 2
FWCI
24.09
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Royal Society Open Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Forestry › Pasture and Agricultural Systems
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agronomy and Crop Science › Livestock Farming and Management
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
Keywords
degraded pastures, pasture recovery, forest restoration, animal husbandry, cattle inventory, technical inefficiency, deforestation prevention, agricultural extension, rural credit, land allocation, Brazilian agribusiness

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review