Andrew Ofstehage's "Welcome to Soylandia"

Andrew Ofstehage is currently a program coordinator for CALS International Programs at North Carolina State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia is the first page of the fourth chapter - “Flexible Farming and the Weediness of Soylandia.” The chapter begins with a paradox of the Cerrado landscape, being that “to supporters of agribusiness, [the Cerrado] is both wasteland and breadbasket.” Further, we are introduced to another paradox, that to US farmers in Western Bahia, farming is “both so easy that it is boring and also requires ‘spoonfeeding the soil’” The reader is re-introduced to Frank, a Missouri-born farmer who now manages a farm in Brazil. Frank complains that “you can’t get farmworkers to do it the American way” and that “no American has taught a Brazilian anything” about agriculture. Coming away from this page, the reader will know that this chapter will explore the complexities of foreign farmers growing soybeans in Brazil.

The content of page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia provides an interesting test of the page 99 experiment. The reader would be right to imagine that this book speaks to agronomic, economic, and social challenges that US farmers face in producing soybeans in Brazil. It speaks to the specific challenges that these farmers face in managing labor and expertise on these farms, even in opposition to their own farmworkers. Further, the reader would be alerted to the fact that Welcome to Soylandia explores various complexities of these farmers’ adventures in Brazil - that their work there is a negotiation with the land and workers.

However, the reader would likely be confused and perhaps put off by the introduction of places and regions that might be unfamiliar to them. Where is Western Bahia? What is the Cerrado? In fact the reader will know that this is a book about Americans growing soybeans somewhere outside of the United States, but unless they possess a knowledge of the geography of Brazil, they will not know quite where.

Still, page 99 captures key themes of Welcome to Soylandia: farmworkers, soils, imperfect hierarchies of work, and flexible farming to name a few. Most importantly, the reader will know that this book, while dealing large-scale agronomic and economic change, focuses on the idiosyncratic farmers who are working with and against the place and idea that I call Soylandia.

Visit Andrew Ofstehage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue