Cotton Calls the Mato Grosso Home

By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director

Up until 1997 there wasn’t a single boll of cotton grown in the state of Mato Grosso. No cotton meant no infrastructure, no gins and no growers.

That was 13 years ago. Today the region grows more than 925,000 acres of cotton supported by hundreds of producers and features 121 state-of-the-art cotton gins. It’s all thanks to a grower cooperative known as AMPA and the Instituto Mato Grossense Do Algodao, or IMA. 

As we learned on Tuesday, grower organizations in Brazil are the backbone of profitable farming here in South America. And unlike U.S. cotton farmer member groups, AMPA and IMA take a different tact when in comes to ensuring the success of the Brazilian cotton industry. As our group heard Wednesday, AMPA and IMA are digging in as the battle between Brazilian and America cotton growers continues to rage.

By comparison, and I’m probably oversimplifying things here a bit, much of the ag research in the U.S. is done by the university system. Universities, in order to generate funding, sell that research to private companies, who in turn charge farmers for use of that technology.

Let’s not forget that public funds (i.e., your tax dollars) were used by those universities to generate things like new cotton seed varieties, as well as disease and drought resistant strains. But here in the Mato Grosso, cooperatives like IMA and AMPA do things a little differently.

The cooperatives hire the researchers, giving them royalties and profit sharing. They then pass their technological advances on co-op members without charging technology fees. It’s one less expense, and a big one, Brazilian cotton farmers have to incur to produce and market their crop.

“They’re serious about their cotton production here,” said class member Scott Shepard, who grows cotton, grains and soybeans on 2,000 acres at his farm in Morehouse Parish. “There’s no way we could do something like that back home.”

Indeed. Crop genetics in the U.S. is a multi-billion dollar business, funded in the American marketplace by American farmers, often times at rates much higher than their global competitors. And while it’s not the sole reason, it’s part and parcel of why many Louisiana cotton farmers (and you know who you are) aren’t farming cotton anymore.

“I think we’ve done a great disservice to our industry by allowing the private sector to purchase technology and sell it back to us,” said Erle West Barham, who grows 2,500 acres of cotton at his farm in Greenwood, Miss. “The Brazilian cotton farmers are reaping all the benefits.”

And it appears the Brazilians are keenly aware of this. In just 13 years the Mato Grosso has developed a thriving cotton industry. From research to planting to ginning to exporting, IMA is completely vertically integrated. And with yields sometimes double what Louisiana cotton growers produce, Brazil is destined to become a major player in the global cotton export market.

Then again, St. Joseph cotton grower Ben Guthrie, president of the Ag Leaders of Louisiana, says there might be more basic factors at work when if comes to growing cotton here in Brazil.

“They have a year ‘round growing season and predictable rains,” Guthrie says. “What more do you need?”