Cowboys get the blues over beef

Once hailed as frontier heroes, ranchers are now at odds with climate and culture change

- Jonathan Watts, Naira Hofmeister and Daniel Camargos

Yellowstone in Montana may have the most romanticised cowboy culture in the world thanks to the TV drama of the same name. But the true home of the 21st-century cowboy is about 12,000km south, in what used to be the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, where the reality of raising cattle 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. Record drought has dried up irrigation ponds and burned pasture grass down to the roots, leaving emaciated cattle behind the fences.

This year, this state 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, due to 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.

"What is our biggest disease today? Depression. That's what is killing the most [producers]," said Thaueny Stival, owner of a mid-sized ranch in Pará. A thoughtful man who says he is trying to modernise and do the right thing, Stival said ranchers were struggling to cope with rapidly changing perceptions about food production. When pioneers 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 had cleared most of their land.

But that partial and romanticised story of Amazon colonisation from half a century ago has been overtaken by more recent and brutal changes.