Study calculates maximum yield per area to avoid cattle laundering

 One way of checking if the cattle produced on properties embargoed due to deforestation is being sold as legal (a practice called cattle laundering) is to assess yield. The topic is the subject of Info Brief 3 of Imaflora’s Beef on Track Program, which presents a summary of the study conducted by researchers from the Luiz de Queiroz Land Studies Foundation of the University of São Paulo (Fealq/USP), the Center for Advanced Applied Economics of USP (Cepea/USP) and the Institute of Agricultural and Forest Management and Certification (Imaflora). The work aims to support the establishment of a livestock productivity index that can be used to guide the monitoring system of livestock suppliers with regard to cattle laundering.

The index is calculated from the stocking rate, the average weights of slaughtered animals found in the Quarterly Slaughter Survey of the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Bureau (IBGE, 2019) and the off-take rates of the modal farms. This provides an estimate of the amount, in heads, of fat cattle that would be ready for slaughter given a certain stocking rate.

The Livestock Monitoring Protocol adopted this analysis by productivity, and the cattle purchaser should calculate the maximum productivity index of the supplier farm. It determines that a theoretical productivity index of cattle heads per hectare per year should be adopted to expose suspected cases of animal triangulation, a term that refers to the possibility of transferring animals from areas with irregularities to others that comply with the requirements of the Terms of Adjustment of Conduct (TAC) and their subsequent sale to beef processing plants.

The study was conducted by Lisandro Inakake de Souza, the coordinator of projects in responsible agricultural chains at Imaflora, Thiago Bernardini de Carvalho and Caio Monteiro, researchers at Cepea, Regina Mazinni Biscalchin, researcher at Fealq, and Ivens Domingos, consultant at ID AgSus