May 19, 2025
#24 What happens on an assetized farm? Transnational Farmers in Soylandia
Building in years of anthropological work and his agronomic expertise, Andrew Ofstehage summarizes his new book Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world, offering a rare close-up of what actually happens on assetized farms. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Ofstehage calls “flexible farms” that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself.
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The extent of land grabbing [1] and financialization [2] on modern agriculture is daunting. Previous contributors to the series have demonstrated the process of financializing groundwater, the flow of money through Brazilian agricultural investments, and the process by which markets and money facilitate the assembly of a financialized dairy industry in Aotearoa New Zealand. What’s common to this scholarship is attention not just to the scale of financialization, but to the process and on-the-ground realities of financialization. Ouma [3] approaches financialization from a perspective of modes of capital, which unpacks taken for granted assumptions and refuses to normalize a novel process of engaging with land. From this perspective, the process by which actors become enrolled in financialization and thereafter become entrenched in operations of capital becomes of paramount importance.
Importantly, using assemblage theory Langford ([4], [5]) shows how local actors can shape the form that investment takes. Investors and investment capital become part of the assemblage of family farms and indigenous rural development plans, though fall short of transforming these assemblages. Finance is sometimes imposed upon farmers with little choice, but as in the cases presented by Langford, farmers also court finance to their own ends. As Ouma [2] clarifies, asset managers need to balance the need to generate returns for investors with other local, national, or transnational players; this balancing act can create more sustainable, long-term investments if done well, or if done poorly, it can threaten the long-term viability of an operation. Even failed land deals upend life on the land by disrupting social life and setting in motion new trajectories for the people and the land [6], as Youjin Chung also showed on this website.
My own research, culminating in my new book Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado, builds on research on the impacts of financialized agriculture on the communities and ecologies of the Brazilian Cerrado (tropical grasslands in Brazil) by asking how these farms emerged in the first place and how they are maintained as assets. Building on the work of Langford and others, my work demonstrates the ways highly financialized farms are created and maintained, but also how the lines of separation between investor and farmer and of production and speculation can become blurred. Both farmers and investors in this case pursue agronomic and financial ends through their work and investment. Here finance is present in every corner of the farm and so is agriculture present in every aspect of finance. Elsewhere I connect the assetization of farms and consequent alienation of work, crops, and soil through “flexible farming” [7]. In Welcome to Soylandia [8] I detail the social, agronomic, and financial work that upholds this model.
In this piece, I explore how financial and agronomic imperatives sit together. As a trained agronomist, I know that owning and occupying land is not enough to produce on the land, even an investor-owner needs to engage with the soil, plants, and water at some level. As an anthropologist of transnational farmers in Brazil, I know that owning the land is not even enough to speculate on land – this requires packaging land as an investment and promotion of the land as an investment and the farmer as a reliable business partner.
My research followed a small group of U.S. farmers, primarily from the Midwest, who used the proceeds from land sales, investment capital, and personal capital to purchase large tracts of land in Western Bahia, Brazil (between 2,000 and 30,000 hectares) for soybean, cotton, and corn production. Researching assetized farms requires an adapted methodological toolkit that includes both riding along in pickups for long conversations and digital practices such as virtual meetings and analysis of farm websites. For more examples on studying agricultural elites in Brazil, see Adams [9], Hoelle [10], Almeida [11], and Gracia [12]. These farmers held different goals and dreams aloft, including the pursuit of adventure, continued farming and migration legacies, and capital accumulation.
Many North America farmers first experienced rural Brazil on farm tours, often led by U.S. born consultants. Farmers recall the awe with which they witnessed seemingly endless acres of flat, productive farmland and the ever-expanding soybean frontier. For many of them, this contrasted sharply with what they were experiencing in the U.S. Midwest. Years of farm consolidation had limited the availability of farmland and rising farmland prices placed land purchases beyond their reach. Brazil offered far cheaper land. The main objective for U.S. farmers to purchase land in Bahia is mixed. They speak of sustaining family farms and seeking out adventure, but often at the forefront is the promise of profit through commodity production and land speculation.
Figure 1: A single wing airplane owned and piloted by an Illinois farmer in Brazil, used to travel from Luis Eduardo to his farm. Source: the author.
From earliest conception, the farmers purchased land in Brazil with an eye to both production and land speculation. They employ a speculative production model in which they create farm corporations or limited liability companies with their own capital or more frequently investment capital to purchase tracts of farmland, machinery, and inputs. These farms frequently report to an executive board made up of investors and the primary farmer. Decisions ultimately lie with the board, in some cases the farmer is the majority holder, in others, they are not and have to follow the directions of the investors. The farmer (who is often also an investor) manages the farm either from the nearby city of Luis Eduardo Magalhaes or from farther afield. Local Brazilian workers do manual labour in the fields and Brazilians from the South of the country drive tractors and advise on agronomic issues. The farms operate year-to-year on a principle of making a profit from commodity production, but the long-term vision for most farms is to eventually sell the land and farm for a speculative profit. The work of the farm is two-fold: to grow profitable commodities and to assemble a farm asset.
Figure 2: A farmer and a tractor driver inspect seed depth after planting. Source: the author.
Their investors are frequently farmers themselves, based in the U.S. Midwest. They invest for a variety of reasons. First, they see production agriculture as a safe investment and one that makes sense to them. Second, investing in Brazilian soy farms can provide them with insider information on the climate and market in Brazil. For farmers, private investors provided quick capital for farm purchases and development. However, in their shift from bank loans to fund production in the United States, to private investments to fund production in Brazil, farmers also relinquished a measure of control as they now had to answer not only to family members but also to stockholders [13].
Calls for investment often focused on the business and farming expertise of the farmer and the seemingly boundless promise of agriculture in Brazil. Investment pitches claimed that Brazil farmland is cheaper, inputs are cheaper, and returns on production are higher. A pro-agriculture government, strong economy, and predictible climate in Brazil made the investment not just profitable but also safe. One investor reported hearing and enjoying a farmer’s investment presentation in Chicago. He was attracted to the presenter’s honest and forthright communication style. He eventually invested a small amount for multiple reasons: to stay informed about production costs and the production environment, gain contacts with US and Brazilian farmers in Brazil, and make a profit.
Investors were attracted to the confident and optimistic outlooks for their farm financing for US farms in Brazil often comes through personal contacts, much in the way that investors for ethanol plants in the Midwest are often local farmers. For farmers who distrust the stock market or other investment funds, ethanol plants and international production groups organized into limited liability companies offer an expected return on investment; they also offer a measure of legibility as less-abstract, more personal and material investments. Nearly all US soy producers in Brazil have formed corporate bodies such as Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) or corporations or are moving toward that model. This reflects the nature of large-scale production in Brazil as much as the changing landscape of family farm corporatization in the United States. Farm investments also mirror global trends of farm financialization [14]. Thus, financial motives, markets, actors, and institutions take on a larger role in farm production and capitalization. Financialized land is both a productive asset and a speculative one. While farmers do intend to profit annually from sales of their harvest, they also expect to sell their developed land at a profit.
Figure 3: Sunset in Luis Eduardo Magalhaes, the city of agribusiness. Source: the author.
Investors and farmers often imagine farmland as a financial asset, but forget about the “unruly materiality of agricultural land” ([14], p. 105). This unruly materiality directly affects production and indirectly affects speculative value for the land. Therefore, these itinerant transnational farms must pay attention to agronomic matters (soil fertility, plant health, water availability, etc) while also attending at least minimally to the business side of the operation (managing workers, government protections for workers and environment, etc.) and the financial outlook of the farm (courting new investors, addressing the concerns of established investors, tracking financial trends, etc). Most farms in Brazil and the United States require attention to both the agronomics and the business, but finance is a different aspect. It changes how farmers relate to each other as they manage the farm to maximize speculative value [7] compete for investment funds [13], and construct farming operations that maximize aesthetics, metrics, and documentation while minimizing long-term relationships with the land, communities, or workers (Ofstehage Forthcoming). Altogether, this package is made possible by what I call flexible farming [7], a model for farming that reflects principles of the Plantationocene while eschewing the rootedness that often accompanies historical plantations from the U.S. South to Brazilian sugar cane fields [15] [16].
Work on transnational soy farms includes both on-farm growing of crops and off-farm growing of financial opportunities (e.g. land speculation, attracting and retaining investors), as well as defending the farm property against liabilities (e.g. lawsuits and governmental fines). Thus, work on transnational soy farms is divided between farm work and office work, and farmers struggle to manage both.
Assetized farm owners manage the aspects of production, business, and finance to maximize the speculative value of the farm while maintaining a basic level of production. Production on farms in Western Bahia depends on heavy fertilization and pesticide use across broad swaths of land. As Lapegna [17] writes of Argentinian soy farmers, genetically modified soy plants and no-tillage fields allow farmers to simplify production practices to the point of “farming by email”. Simplification of agronomy allows farmers to focus on business and finance.
Management of the business aspects of assetized farms accounts for the majority of farm owners’ attention, time, and anxiety. With relatively low pay and difficult working conditions, but also a high demand for labor, soy farms in Western Bahia have high worker turnover. Workers often move from farm to farm in search of better on-farm living conditions and in-the-field working conditions, while others leave the industry altogether. Thus, much of the farm owners’ concern is maintaining a labor force on which they depend as well as a team of upper-level workers (agronomists, field managers, tractor-drivers, accountants, and even public relations specialists). Further, a major worry is violating, or getting caught violating, government regulations to protect farm workers, the environment, and land sovereignty in Brazil.
All of this work is meant only to maintain the productivity of the farm and to accrue speculative value, but a different kind of work is necessary to optimize this goal. Farmers have developed farm websites, slide decks, elevator pitches, and newsletters to inform investors and potential investors on the quality of their work as farm owners and the value of their farm asset. Just as farming practices shift to minimize the necessary engagement with the land, farming values shift as traditional markers of good farming like high yields, straight rows of crops, and stewardship of the land lose importance compared to metrics of return on investment, worker turnover, and even the cleanliness of the farmer owner themselves (a clean set of clothes indicates that the farmer has the proper priorities of managing the farm instead of working on the farm. One U.S. farmer in Brazil framed farm management as a dependence on local know-how that U.S. managers and farmers may not possess:
‘You really need to have the local manager from that country managing a lot of that day to day stuff and ah you know I could try and find some Americans to come down and help run things on the farm more but I would have a hard time finding people that can really adapt to the culture, be among the workers and learn the language and stay around here for a long period of time so I strongly prefer having a local manager and, and training those type of guys.’
The assetized farm requires a reimagination of what farm work looks like and how a farm is managed. Finance becomes enmeshed in all aspects of the farm, from the creation of the farm website and investor newsletter, to the selection of seeds and planting dates. Looking at finance and farming together on the ground, the image of finance imposing itself upon farmers shifts towards and image of farmers courting capital and transforming the farm into a capitalized asset. On the other side of the coin, investors in these operations are interested not only for financial gain, but also to gain knowledge of markets and production in Brazil to inform their own decision making on U.S. farms.
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