Economically feasible, socially fair, and environmentally correct cattle raising. It is based on these assumptions that thousands of cattle farmers throughout Brazil are adapting to the Good Livestock Practices Program (Programa de Boas Práticas Agropecuárias - BPA) for beef cattle, developed by The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária - Embrapa). This set of norms is intended to ensure animal well-being and as a result, to ensure food quality. “The key purpose is to ensure the supply of safe food to the consumer market, originating from sustainable production systems,” explained Mr. Ezequiel Rodrigues do Valle BPA coordinator.

Good practices provide for optimizing grazing land in order to increase production per hectare and to maintain the local environment. This includes a concern with reducing silting of rivers and dams, maintaining the ground healthy by integrating agriculture and cattle raising, or also by adding reforestation to these areas in a system known as agro-forestry-livestock, which increases carbon sequestration in these regions. “Brazilian environmental legislation is one of the strictest in the world. It is stronger still in the Amazon region. Producers have to be economically feasible in a region in which they are required to produce on 20% of their area and to preserve 80%,” asserted Valle.