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Yellowstone in Montana may have the most romanticised cowboy culture in the world thanks to the TV drama series of the same name starring Kevin Costner. But the true home of the 21st-century cowboy is about 7,500 miles south, in what used to be the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, where the reality of raising cattle and producing beef is better characterised by depression, market pressure and vexed efforts to prevent the destruction of the land and its people.
The toll was apparent along the rutted PA 279 road in Pará state. Signs of human and environmental stress were not hard to find during the last dry season. Record drought had dried up irrigation ponds and burned pasture grass down to the roots, leaving emaciated cattle behind the fences. Exposed red soil was whipped up into dust devils as SUVs and cattle trucks sped past on their way between Xinguara and São Félix do Xingu, which is home to both the biggest herd on the planet and the fastest erasure of forest in the Amazon.
Later this year, Pará will host the Cop30 climate conference, which would be an ideal moment for Brazil to demonstrate progress on a new system to track livestock and reduce emissions from deforestation. That system should be completed by the end of 2026. But few ranchers believe this will happen because of the huge gulf between what locals want and what the world needs.
The first ranchers here were once told they were heroes for opening new economic frontiers. But the climate crisis has dealt a triple blow to their reputation and their livelihoods: not only has it become harder to feed and water their livestock, they now face criticism for wrecking a biodiverse pillar of the global environment while also bearing the brunt of conflicting demands from multinational food corporations to provide food that is both economically cheap and ecologically ethical.
At a time when humanity is breaching more and more environmental limits, this challenge is more than many can bear.
“What is our biggest disease today? Depression. That’s what is killing the most (producers),” says Thaueny Stival, the owner of a mid-sized ranch in the small town of Água Azul do Norte.
A thoughtful man who says he is trying to modernise and do the right thing, Stival says ranchers are struggling to cope with rapidly changing perceptions about food production. When pioneers first arrived in this region in the 1980s, he says, they were encouraged to clear forest by Brazil’s government (then a military dictatorship). Banks would not give them loans unless they cleared most of their land.
That partial and romanticised story of Amazon colonisation from half a century ago has been overtaken by more recent and brutal changes. In this region, the vast majority of ranchers have invaded public lands without permission. Now there is growing evidence that the deforestation that followed is pushing the Amazon to the point of no return, with dire consequences for the world’s climate. The result is that the ranchers who once considered themselves national heroes are now treated as global pariahs.
Stival says the average rancher is suffering beyond endurance. “Now he is seeing his assets being diluted by government rules and corporate regulations … and soon he will not be able to sell his product, and he will have financial difficulties. What will he do? Either he will commit suicide, or he will become depressed. The guy says: ‘I did everything and now I can’t support my family?’”
It’s a common lament in the Amazon ranching community, and one that helps to explain why populist politicians such as the former president Jair Bolsonaro and the US president, Donald Trump, have such an appeal. It taps straight into the existential debate about the role of frontier men and women – farmers, miners, oil workers – in a world where wide-open spaces are increasingly constrained by environmental limits.
The economist Kenneth Boulding wrote six decades ago about the need for humanity to transition away from a “cowboy economy” of endless frontiers and unlimited growth towards a “spaceman economy” that would treat the Earth as a giant life-support system, carefully managing and cycling finite resources while strengthening ways to capture and use the unlimited energy provided by the sun. For oil workers, miners, and ranchers, these are not philosophical discussions, but attacks on their existence, on what they do every single day. They are life-or-death issues that create uncertainty and insecurity and help to foster political extremism.
The revolt of the cowboys helps to explain the rise of far right demagogues but it doesn’t change the reality of the climate crisis, which is driven by physics and chemistry, not opinion and politics. The question is not whether change will come, but how soon and how disruptive it will be. Ranchers have started to see with their own eyes how the Amazonian climate is becoming more hostile. And some are responding.
Stival says he is now investing in genetically enhanced livestock, chemical fertiliser and other technology to improve efficiency, rather than expanding through the clearance of more forest. This is a common claim in the region, though researchers say the change is incremental and largely driven by necessity – there is very little forest left to cut down.
Stival insists the mindset of ranchers has shifted: “We used to look at the land as a table, we just wanted to make it bigger, but today we look at it as a building. We want to increase productivity in a smaller area.”
But he complains authorities are placing too much of a burden on farmers. “No one can get a loan from a bank any more because [they are told] ‘Oh, that area of yours is not reforested,” he laments. “And in a little while your cattle will be illegal cattle, then what are you going to do?”
He is referring to plans – promised by JBS – the world’s largest meat producer, which is the majority buyer from ranchers in the Amazon – for a new birth-to-abattoir tracking system that will, supposedly by the end of this year, tag and trace every head of cattle in the Amazon to ensure none of them are raised in areas that have been deforested. An investigation by the Guardian and its partners suggests this deadline will be missed. JBS told the Guardian that it respectfully contested the conclusions of the investigation, but added that “while the sector-wide challenges are significant and larger than any one company can solve on its own, we believe JBS has an in-depth and robust series of integrated policies, systems, and investments that are making a material and positive impact on reducing deforestation risks”.
The company have so far not succeeded in mapping the entire supply chain, a target due, under its deforestation commitments, to be completed by the end of this year, but a spokesperson told the Guardian JBS has enrolled the equivalent of “more than 80% of its annual cattle purchases” onto the blockchain-enabled platform. “As you are aware, the challenges of addressing illegal deforestation on cattle operations that span millions of farms across hundreds of thousands of square kilometeres are significant.” Its response includes a zero tolerance for deforestation sourcing policy, state-of-the-art supply-chain monitoring, free technical assistance for producers to help regularise their farms, and the JBS fund for the Amazon, as well as working with partners to implement solutions and develop protocols such as the Beef on Track initiative in the Amazon biome. “Cattle-raising in the Amazon is undergoing a sectoral transformation, and one company cannot solve all the industry’s challenges.”
Stival accepts that change is needed, but he says neither JBS nor the authorities are doing enough to meet the year-end deadline because the scale of environmental violations and confusion over land in southern Pará is just too enormous. Asked if JBS can put its new system in place by December, he shakes his head: “There is no way.”
The same mood of frustration and dismay is evident at the next town, a few hundred kilometres further along the road. “This won’t be resolved by the end of 2026,” says Françival Cassiono do Rego, the president of the Tucumã-Ourilândia Union of Rural Producers. “About 80% of the producers in this region don’t have a definitive title. We have been trying to resolve this for 20, 30 years and no one has come up with a solution.”
Researchers say that is largely because that many farmers are suspected of invading their land, but Cassiono do Rego blames the EU – the world’s biggest market – for passing a deforestation-free trade rule that has prompted JBS and Brazilian authorities to step up monitoring. Like many ranchers, Cassiono do Rego sees this as a tactic in a trade war driven by foreign farmers who want to weaken the competition offered by cheap Amazonian beef.
Adelosmar Antonio Orio, a sprightly 82-year-old rancher more widely known as “Ticão”, insists the environment is a secondary concern compared to land regularisation. “The biggest concern today for cattle ranchers here is this legal uncertainty. We’ve already lost a partner, a comrade. He put a gun to his head and killed himself … It wasn’t just one person, it was several. It’s happened before … Pressure and depression come. But there is no solution.”
Environmentalists, scientists and public defenders argue that many of these woes are self-inflicted. Countless ranchers are out of legal compliance, they argue, because they invaded land or broke rules on forest clearance. At several points in the past decade, São Felix do Xingu has had the dubious distinction of contributing more greenhouse gases than any of the other 5,000 municipalities in Brazil, according to the civil society coalition the Climate Observatory, as a result of burning forests to create pasture for its 2.5m cattle. It is largely thanks to places like this that Brazilian agriculture has a more destructive carbon footprint than the industrial powerhouse of Japan.
And rather than clean up, many in the beef industry have simply found loopholes that allow them to carry on with the old ways. “Cattle laundering”, which hides the origins of livestock from environmentally embargoed ranches, is so widespread that few farmers bother to hide what they are doing.
The expansion of JBS has run right alongside this. Since the 1970s, while the rainforest has lost about 20% of its cover, the company has opened or acquired 21 slaughterhouses in the legal Amazon and built a network of 19,000 suppliers in the region. Despite frequent promises to clean up its supply chain, the company has repeatedly been found to be buying from farmers who illegally cleared forest.
JBS’s latest “global commitment” is for deforestation-free supply chains by the end of 2025. It has established a network of “green offices” to provide free consultation to ranchers on how to meet the requirements of its new hi-tech tracking platform. At the Tucumã meatpacking plant, a company representative, Vitoria Batista, explained how artificial intelligence and WhatsApp messaging would remotely monitor supplier farms and advise ranchers on regulatory and corporate requirements.
“We need to break paradigms,” she says. JBS pays for outside consultants to help ranchers move into compliance. “It’s all done by women,” Batista says. “The first impression [of the producers] is not easy, but then they understand and they see for themselves that it is necessary, that there is no way to get away from it, that they have to regularise.”
At another Amazonian frontier town, Rondon do Pará, a windowless, air-conditioned lecture room is the setting for a meeting about land and how to modernise its productivity. Big outdoor men hunch behind small desks and listen to consultants and lawyers, who show PowerPoint presentations on market trends, cattle tracing, pasture maintenance, daily weight gain, soil analysis, fertiliser inputs, herbicide costs, environmental embargos, indigenous land rights and rainfall shortages. In short, all the legal and data-driven essentials for the archetypal rancher of the 21st-century world.
A keynote speaker at this Encontro dos Pecuaristas (meeting of the Livestock Farmers) is the lawyer and land-owner Vinicius Borba, a slim man with a thin beard and a sharp turn of phrase. Borba says he represents rural producers who occupy the indigenous territory of Apyterewa. Before the meeting, he had spoken defiantly about his own environmental penalties and accusations of wrongdoing, which he blamed on the government’s failure to legitimise his property. “I am called a land-grabber, an invader, a deforester, but it is not my fault,” he said. “I have a property that we have occupied for over 20 years, and to this day the government has not given me the title … Since the regularisation never comes, I end up becoming a statistic, another land-grabber.”
Borba says ranchers are victims of environmental policy shifts. “What we see today is a rule being changed in the middle of the game,” he tells the gathering of ranchers. “I don’t think it’s fair, I don’t think it’s legal, but it’s our reality.”
He argues, like many Brazilians, that double standards are being applied, because Europe has already cleared most of its forests. What he omits to mention is that the forests of Europe were mainly cleared several centuries ago, when there was no inkling of the climate impact. Today, those consequences are unmistakable. As Borba gives his address, the Amazon is suffering its second year of debilitating drought. For decades, rainy seasons have been shrinking along with the rainforest. This is hard on farmers as well as the global climate.
Beyond the heroic stories of carving through the forest, Amazonian cattle ranching is actually propped up by hefty subsidies. Perverse commercial incentives encourage farmers to destroy forest. The most lucrative profits come from a mark-up of land valuations after territory is seized and occupied by cattle. “The more legal you are, the less you are worth,” one rancher told me. “If your land is 80% forest, then nobody wants to buy it.”
With the money from property speculation, some land-grabbers have been able to fund political parties, evangelical groups and media organisations. So much is at stake that some resort to murder and violence to drive others off the land. The risks of punishment are low and the potential rewards are enormous. State governors and municipal mayors may come from the agriculture and extractive industries, many of which grew powerful by seizing land. The “ruralist bloc” has a powerful presence in the national congress, and had a particularly powerful influence on the presidency during the 2019-2023 era of Jair Bolsonaro.
But there are also ranchers who believe change will usher in a better future. Mauro Lúcio Costa is every inch the model, modern rancher. His traditional cowboy attire – Texas Stetson, crisp white shirt, big belt buckle, blue jeans and brown boots – belies his use of advanced husbandry technology and environmentally progressive land management practices on his extensive farm. He is compliant with forest code requirements that he preserve 80% of the vegetation, yet, thanks to careful selection of livestock and minutely calibrated fertiliser inputs, he has one of the most productive and profitable farms in the Amazon. Ten years ago, he established his own supply-chain tracing system. Initially, he says, this was not for environmental motives but as a management tool that would help him to improve the quality of his herd and reassure customers. “I started this in 2015, because it was clear to me that the market would demand it,” he said.
Once he started looking, he found 40% of his cattle and 30% of his suppliers were not compliant with environmental standards. Cutting them and finding alternatives was the biggest expense of the new system – and he predicts this will also prove the case for the big meatpacking companies. To avoid this in the future, he has teamed up with a company called Niceplanet to develop a smartphone app that helps suppliers to attain compliance.
Lúcio Costa peppers his speech with biblical references, a sign not just of his religious faith but his skill in winning over grassroots audiences in a realm dominated by the “bibles, bullets and beef” lobby. He has also persuaded prominent conservationists, although others have doubts about the chemical inputs he is adding to soil to increase pasture productivity and weight gain in his stock. Lúcio Costa also has the ear of senior figures in JBS and the government, and is often held up as an example of the gains that could come from effective monitoring and greater intensification.
He is working to help JBS implement its tracing system, and unlike most people interviewed for this story, he believes it can be done by the end of this year. The alternative, he says, is almost too terrible to contemplate: the company’s withdrawal from its three meatpacking centres in southern Pará. “It would close its plants here, which would cause JBS no problem at all because it has plants all over the world … but for us producers in Pará, it would be a huge loss.” That is why, he says, he is trying to persuade ranchers to embrace the change, even though JBS is a competitor to his family’s own meatpacking facility. “When it comes to livestock farming I can’t just look out for myself, I have to look out for livestock farming, and in my view, it’s very bad for livestock farming in Pará if JBS leaves here.”
Cristina Malcher, the president of the Women’s Commission in Agriculture, and a Bolsonaro supporter like most ranchers we spoke to, says Brazilian meatpacking companies dictate low prices in the Amazon, sell globally for big profits, and are now trying to introduce a new transparency system that will put all the burden on ranchers, while allowing them to claim to be a sustainable company and charge higher prices. “JBS is a cancer,” she says. “JBS only works in its favour. It wants the market abroad, so it comes here and sets a bunch of rules for us to follow because it has made a commitment to the world.”
But she believes it is a ruse to appease foreign interests, like the tricks that the 19th-century Brazilian slavers used to fob off inspections by foreign, usually British, abolitionists. It is a way, she says, of “pretending we cannot do anything illegal or irregular so they are able, as they say, to make something ‘for the English to see’”.
All the same, she says, change is coming, whether ranchers like it or not. “Unfortunately, the environmental issue is here to stay,” she says, of the growing pressure for transparent tracking systems to eradicate deforestation from supply chains. “If we don’t wake up, we will be left out of rural production.”
