The ethnocentric steer

perceptions and obsessions in the introduction of european livestock science into brazilian tropical cattle ranching, c. 1880-1950

Abstract

An important part of the European Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the expansion of modern animal husbandry. Following on developments in crop agriculture, livestock farmers adopted a wide variety of technical innovations. Selective breeding, disease control, pasture management, etc. Radically transformed a previously inconsistent sector. Rapidly exported to the rest of the world, the new animal science came to define the goal of livestock management in what soon became the premier global beef cattle producing regions of the Americas. By the mid to late-nineteenth century one of these was Brazil, though new techniques were only adopted as they were perceived to be useful and affordable. This was especially the case in Mato Grosso state, where ranching had a long history but responded to outside economic demands with a seemingly contradictory mixture of sluggish traditionalism and innovative experimentation. The result was a debate between “modernizers” who denigrated the “backward” state of the local industry and those with experience in a sector that was isolated geographically and generated limited income beyond local markets.