#11 | tossing cheeses into the litter: what hampers small farmers in Brazil to thrive
disposal of animal-derived products is the result of a recent animal product inspection policy; municipalities have the autonomy to formulate their legislation, but not half developed the services yet
It didn't happen once, nor one hundred times in the past few years: whole artisanal cheeses, lacking an inspection registry, were apprehended and destroyed in a landfill – usually by incineration. The most famous ones were chef Roberta Sudbrack's case (350 pounds of artisanal cheese and sausages were confiscated at the Rock in Rio Festival) in 2017 and the almost 265 pounds of Farm Lano-Alto's cheeses on July 4, 2021.
In the first case, the products had the state inspection registry (SIE, in Portuguese), but were being commercialized outside their original federative unit – by the law, they had to have a federal inspection registry (SIF, in Portuguese). In the second case, an anonymous delation led the health surveillance inspectors to the farm and made the apprehension because the cheese pieces didn't have a municipal inspection registry (SIM, in Portuguese). Nonetheless, the São Luiz do Paraitinga city, where the farm is located, regulated its SIM 26 days later on July 30, 2021.
What farmers from Lano-Alto had passed is not rare in Brazil. "In cheesemakers' WhatsApp groups you constantly see images of health surveillance inspectors tossing out cheese," says Bruno Benati, agronomist and cheesemaker from Cuitelo Real. Along with his brother Enzo, Bruno retook cheese production in 2016 on the 20-hectare property in Itapeva, in the extreme south of Minas Gerais. The herd, of about 50 animals, had 18 cows producing milk that May when we spoke on the phone. Following his hello, I hear a lowing. "Never mind the noise, I'm here in the middle of the fields," says Bruno.
Bruno and Enzo make between 8 and 12 kilos a day – in pounds, the range would be something like 17.6 to 26.5. By area, size of the "team", and the volume produced Cuitelo Real fits the understanding of small property, according to the definitions of Article 143-A of Decree 5741/06. Family arrangements or with a lean structure of employees, with a varied agricultural production between legumes, vegetables, dairy cattle, laying birds or animals for meat are the basis of the economy of 90% of Brazilian municipalities with up to 20 thousand inhabitants, as revealed by the Census Agro 2017 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Theoretically, having a municipal inspection registry is the most accessible health registry for the small producer. "Theoretically" because, despite being a structure that the municipality could create to standardize the production of animal origin and guarantee the health safety of its population, its implementation is not mandatory – of the 5,568 Brazilian municipalities, less than half have an inspection service. This means that all over Brazil there are potential cheeses and salami with flavors and aromas unexplored due to a lack of investment in local inspection services.
Roughly speaking, inspection services consist of visits by health surveillance inspectors (generally, veterinarians), who check sanitary facilities and conditions in the space where the herds are kept and in the processing units; workers' practices in handling animals; the hygiene and storage of products; the health of the herd; vaccination against zoonoses; among others, in addition to monitoring the evolution of the activity, the results of exams and laboratory analyzes, and periodically collecting a random sample for analysis.
In municipalities that don't have the SIM service, it is common for health surveillance to accept labels with the registered number of the producer, telephone number, product technical manager, date of manufacture, expiration date, nutritional table and address of the producer, for example, for sale at fairs and other trading occasions. But in most cases, there is expected to be a state or federal inspection registry, otherwise, it goes off the shelf to the trash can. In cities where there is the SIM service, the producer would not be able to legally commercialize his production of animal origin outside his property without the registry.
The policies of municipal and state authorities were established by Law 7889/89, published one year after the Federal Constitution was granted. It aimed at decentralizing the government, giving it to regional bodies. "The only caveat is that the definition of these spheres cannot conflict with the federal one by being less demanding. But they can be more demanding," explains Judi Nóbrega, director of the Department of Support and Standards at the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (DNS – MAPA). Each municipality is free to write its rules and requirements according to the local reality. In Minas Gerais state, the cheese culture is spread in cities of all sizes. That may be taken into consideration by local authorities when writing the regulation. In some cases, they can ask for a raw material analysis to make sure that the milk does not have zoonoses; in others, an analysis of the final product, the cheese, plus the documentation of the entire production process could be asked.
There is no coordinating body that structures the implementation of municipal records, nor do the governments of the federative units have responsibility for or legal force to oblige municipalities to implement the SIM service. MAPA does not even have information on how many Brazilian municipalities have an inspection service.
Regionalizing a health regulation is a change of scale: the smaller the observed universe, the better it is possible to see specificities.
"The municipal scale presupposes a closer contact between producer and inspector. It is not for the inspector to be a police officer, nor to relax the rules for his community. He can contribute to the process and build the local economy together. Depending on the pending situation, the producer does not have to stop his activities. You can tell him "you need to adjust this and that issue" and then talk about priorities and deadlines," says Fabíola Fernandes Schwartz, a veterinary doctor who has been working with organic products of animal origin consultancy and food processing for the food industry consultancy for over 30 years. "Unless, of course, it's a public calamity," she points out – she has also worked in health surveillance departments in small towns.
In practice, producers' reports repeat the same issues: mismatched information; long waiting periods to receive an inspection for the registry; requests to change small details until the next inspection (no date set), and denial of issuing the registry, making it impossible for the producer to operate legally, a period that can reach months. "The producer in Brazil already has the challenge of reaching the market and selling his product. We shouldn't put so many obstacles and hinder the guy who wants to produce. He hardly has the working capital to stay still for so long," contextualizes Fabíola.
To avoid the discarding of some of their pieces, Cuitelo Real doesn't send their cheese to any cheese store. "The ones that have had problems with health surveillance don't receive our cheese. We have many partners in Salvador, João Pessoa, Florianópolis, Curitiba and cities in the interior of São Paulo state. But Campinas and São Paulo capital, where it would make sense to sell my cheese because we are close geographically, we don't send it because of the inspection," Bruno says. At open markets, the volume of cheese is so small that it fits in a personal car, without the need for a van, a model that is highly sought after by inspectors.
Of the five types made by Bruno and Enzo, three are raw milk: Cuitelo (aged from two to four months); Cuitelinho (aged for 30 days); and Casca Florida (similar to Cuitelo in production, but kept in a humid environment to develop fungi and mites on its bark for about 45 days). There is also Boursin and Graúna (dry curd wrapped in charcoal and paprika, with Penicillium candidum inoculated into the rind to form white fungi; aged for approximately two weeks), made with boiled milk, as well as yogurt, jams, and honey. Their Cuitelinho and Cuitelo cheeses and the yogurt won medals in the 2019 editions of Mundial do Queijo and Queijo Brasil awards.
Cuitelo Real’s pieces and slices appeared on pages of gastronomy magazines and the social networks of famous Brazilian chefs – Sudbrack included. However, the legally selling of these cheeses could only be done within the farm itself, because Cuitelo Real was unable to submit its production to the SIM in Itapeva. The city passed the municipal inspection law in 2015 and has a veterinary doctor located at the health department, but Bruno was never able to schedule an inspection of his property, which has been adapted following the federative unit guidelines.
Bruno's last contact with the Municipality of Itapeva was in March 2022. Since then, Cuitelo Real has changed direction and pursued the registration of small agro-industry by the Instituto Mineiro de Agropecuária (IMA), with even more demanding and specific infrastructure. The Municipality of Itapeva was contacted by email, message, and phone calls to comment on the structure and functioning of its inspection service, but did not return with the requested information until the closing of this report, on June 3rd.
In the logic of bureaucracy, when the municipal instance cannot or does not have the means to issue the inspection registry, the producer should look for a higher instance, and ask for the state inspection service (all 26 Brazilian states and the federal district have SIE) or the federal one. But that's when the chickens come home to roost.
Without the municipality's attention to local production, the producer is at the mercy of more general legislation, such as the characteristics of the construction of processing units and the need to build them further away from the residence. “By custom and use, many producers have the cheese dairy next door, in humbler facilities,” exemplifies Bruno.
Regarding health standards, the objective is always to avoid contamination and outbreaks of diseases, so there would be no reason to be flexible in this regard. "Barrier measures are adopted to minimize problems until the product reaches the consumer. One of these measures is the registration of the establishment because this guarantees that the producer follows a set of rules of good practices and adequate facilities. Other barriers will be the pasteurization of milk, for example, to avoid the risk of developing brucellosis and tuberculosis, or at least 60 days of cheese maturation, a period that has been proven by studies to have the same effect as pasteurization. These conditions will be required in any inspection service," explains Judi.
Cuitelo Real opted for a state registry in Minas Gerais. That means they will have to change part of their recipes so that the cheeses have 60 days of ripening or are pasteurized. Despite having state legislation that recognizes cheese as a symbol of Minas Gerais identity (article 3 of Law 23,157/18), the understanding of the artisanal way seems opposed to the authorial way: the way of making artisanal Minas cheese, if invented in the 21st century, it would hardly be allowed to be sale with its 21 days of maturing.
"There is no pre-existing classification for our cheeses, because they have original recipes, from adaptations of traditional preparations to experimentations that worked," says Bruno. Without documentation of their methods of preparation with similar results by different producers – such as traditional cheeses, made for at least a century throughout the state of Minas Gerais –, it is unlikely that raw milk cheeses that are outside the traditions and denominations of origin will pass by the inspection bodies.
Pasteurization would de-characterize Cuitelo Real's cheeses, killing the microorganisms that transform the product throughout its life and that are responsible for the complexity of flavors and aromas. "We're going to register Cuitelo, which fits this 60-day maturing rule, and we're going to increase the time for Cuitelo to complete 60 days, probably leaving it refrigerated. We're going to have to change some processes for Casca Florida", explains Bruno.
In the understanding of sanitary barriers, proven healthy milk, handled in an appropriate environment, with good practices of cheesemakers, still does not configure as many barriers as possible to reduce the risk of contamination within the production unit. From the farm door out, the responsibility would no longer be the producer's, but the loss would. "In the case of transport carried out at the wrong temperature, a fungal or bacterial contamination will spread much more easily in a pasteurized cheese than in a raw milk cheese, which has a series of well-established microorganisms to compete for substrate," compares Bruno.
According to a survey by the National Conference of Municipalities (CNM) carried out in 2017 with 4,743 municipalities, 40% of them (1,917 municipalities) had a structured municipal inspection service. Among the reasons for not creating the registry, there are reasons for lack of budgetary and financial resources; few agro-industrial establishments in the municipality; lack of human resources in the sector; and lack of training and information for technicians. In the Guidance Manual on the Constitution of the Municipal Inspection Service (SIM), published in 2013, the motivations were similar.
As an alternative to increasing the number of municipalities providing the inspection service and increasing the number of regularized establishments, consortia of municipalities for issuing the SIM have come into force since 2018. According to the CNM consortium portal, there are 66 municipal inspection registry consortia, which can bring together up to 30 municipalities under the same SIM.
Constant criticism from producers is that if the requirements of municipal and state inspection are so rigorous and committed to guaranteeing sanitary safety, why couldn't SIM and SIE inspection records be valid nationally, like a SIF?
The Brazilian System of Inspection of Products of Animal Origin (SISBI-POA) is a strategy by MAPA to make the SIM and SIE equivalent to the SIF. Created in 2006, as part of the Unified Agricultural Health System (SUASA), SISBI is a voluntary membership program. Neither municipalities, consortia of municipalities, nor federative units are required to register. And, even after they are registered, there is no deadline for them to adhere to the SUASA common rules.
By the end of May, 23 Brazilian states and the federal district had adhered, as well as 14 consortia of municipalities (representing 257 municipalities) and 31 individual municipalities (out of a total of 448 registered on the platform). In other words, only 288 cities had a SIM that counts as a SIF since the creation of the equivalence system, in 2006. A drop in the ocean that Brazil is.
Another move by MAPA in an attempt to approach small-scale demands was Ordinance 393/2021, which simplifies the adhesion of small producers to the SIF. In the norm, as soon as the small producer's documents are approved, he receives a provisional registration to start operating. Everything is done digitally.
Within 90 days after the operation starts, an inspector from one of MAPA's regional superintendencies will visit the property to carry out the inspection. "Ordinance 393 is a revision of Decree 9013, published on August 18, 2020. For federal legislation, it simplifies as far as possible for low-risk establishments to obtain the SIF. In the classification made by MAPA, the production of cheese, honey, and eggs are low risk," explains Ana Lúcia Viana, director of the Department of Inspection of Product of Origin Animal (DIPOA) – MAPA.
In Fabíola's assessment, it is a sign that MAPA recognizes that the previous federal legislation was not very accessible to small producers. "The bureaucratic procedures are similar to the state service, and it depends a lot on the interpretation and goodwill of the inspector who is going to audit. But it is a way for the small producer to have a SIF, that is commendable".
Once the SIM, SIE, or SIF is received by the producer, the difficulties do not douse. The lack of direction persists, and it is understandable why inspectors do not identify themselves as counselors – also, in many locations, rural extension is little or non-existent. Outside the region of the strong performance of a research and rural extension agency (and especially if the crop or herd is not so economically significant), the rural producer has a world of possibilities before him, but he often needs to grope his way through the stones. Alone. Possibly going around in circles. And barefoot.
Brazil has 3.9 million agricultural establishments classified as family farming, equivalent to 77% of Brazilian rural properties. This percentage occupies 23% of the land destined for agriculture and livestock in Brazil. A more robust and coordinated action by rural extension aimed at this slice would be an important first step, but it would not solve everything. The main benefit commonly made available to small producers is low-interested credit lines. "It could have herd vaccination supported partially by the State, for example, because the sector of products of animal origin is strategic for Brazil. This type of public policy fixes the man in the field and guarantees the local supply," analyzes Fabíola.
The increase in the volume of rural credit in the late 1990s and early 2000s was responsible for the expansion of property purchases. The Ripka family was one of those who seized the moment. Working for decades in the production of vegetables, leasing the Chácara Tiniara, in Mandirituba, in the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba, the family bought the 4.9 bushels in 2001 through the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (Pronaf). "About three years later, rural loans began to be released as a benefit and we sold half of the farm to pay the bill," recalls Danilo Ripka. "I am a wild card on the property. Administration, finance, logistics, management, sales. I am present on all fronts after my parents retired," says he, responsible for the poultry farm, whose health registration was issued by the state body.
Since 2009, the farm's egg production has been certified as organic and has reached 4,000 birds. Currently, there is a batch of 1,150 pullets that are "beginning to drip eggs" and 650 in late laying. The difference in the size of the lots is due to the deaths of the animals: as they age, the chickens die naturally or due to fatalities such as attacks by their companions. "At peak posture, any noise triggers them to get scared and start attacking each other. Every day I hang pasture in a tree or the middle of the chicken coop so they spend energy jumping to peck the burden. They also eat the leftover vegetables from the fair, like cabbage and pumpkin," says Danilo.
For almost a decade producing organic eggs, the family worked most of the time buying "leftovers" from middlemen, and never had a forecast of how many pullets they would have. Therefore, at the end of 2020, Danilo filed an application for registration for the management of birds with the Agricultural Defense Agency of Paraná (ADAPAR), which makes it possible to buy the lots directly from animal genetics companies.
The registration came out in November 2021 and, for a year, the family worked to meet the requirements. Among them, concentrating the aviaries in one point of the property, getting rid of subsistence chickens, making car disinfection arches in the accesses, and establishing a procedure to control who enters and leaves the property, among others. The bureaucracy has also increased: new pullets can only be received on the property if the older batch is documented to be sent to a slaughterhouse. Before, with smaller lots, the activity was not configured as a poultry trade and the Ripka could sell the birds to whoever they wanted.
The first batch that needed to be evicted under the new terms had around 800 chickens and revealed yet another constraint that small producers face. Danilo posted an appeal on Chácara Tiniara's Instagram profile in March when he had already been looking for a solution for "discard" (a term used for the slaughter of laying hens) for weeks. For months the hens had been in a separate space, without laying eggs, but they were still being fed the best feed and being cared for as the active flock. No slaughterhouse less than three hours from Mandirituba would buy discarded batches or accept such a small batch. The chickens ended up being donated to a buyer who paid for the shipping. The exposure on social networks generated a series of contacts and next time Danilo is going to send the next batches "for rides" with the thousands of birds from a nearby commercial farm.
Of the investments, tests, laboratory analyses, fees, and other costs to establish an animal production property, the most consistent offer from the State to Danilo and Bruno was rural credit. "We were able to take 30% profit before. Today to get 10% is difficult, even readjusting prices," reveals Danilo. "I'm studying Geography, doing this 'insurance' for myself, because if in three or four years the production doesn't work anymore, I have nowhere to run," he admits. Credit alone is not enough to keep a man in the field.
"The Brazilian reality, in terms of small producers and quality raw material, is unparalleled. We have a heritage: Brazilian poultry is very important in the world and the issue of biosafety is fundamental for the maintenance of this chain. But local production, for the domestic market, is not valued", laments Fabiola. "There is no subsidy to keep the producer in the field, as there are producers in the European Union," she exemplifies.
In Europe, by the way, small animal producers are considered the most authentic representations of local food culture. Raw milk cheeses, artisanal sausages, and eggs from small farms are part of gastronomic experiences that few tourists have access to. In rural Brazil, only agribusiness holders can pay.