Agricultural System in Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2006

Tropical forest loss remains a major environmental trade-off vis-à-vis the provision of food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy for an increasingly affluent world population. The effectiveness of agricultural intensification as a key strategy to manage and mitigate this trade-off is, however, contested. Increasing productivity can lead to either land expansion or land-saving depending on context-specific factors, such as land and output market conditions, the type of technology being used, and institutional arrangements including conservation policy. This dataset is used to investigate economic mechanisms behind intensification and land use decisions based on agricultural census data from the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a region known for large-scale soy and cattle production with both consolidated and unconsolidated agricultural frontiers taking place in three different biomes.

Quality/Lineage: Various sources of secondary data were used to create this database. Mainly the Brazilian agricultural census of 2006 and the agricultural surveys between 2004-2006. All data was processed using R and Rstudio.