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Peasantry. Small farmers. Industrialization of agriculture.
This study aims to understand the trajectory, resistances and transformations of peasant traditions (values, techniques and knowledge) of small farmers in the municipality of Rio Verde (GO), in view of the transformations caused by the industrialization of agriculture. This municipality was born from the aegis of extensive cattle raising, but for a long time it lived with subsistence agriculture, depended on it and was one of the pioneers in the processes of mechanization of agriculture in Goiás. Large-scale cereal production, mainly soy , whose cultivation began in the 1970s, imposed new demands on the field. From that period onwards, the old forms of production and the social organization of the countryside underwent major changes, directly impacting the lives of populations living in rural areas. The work of the large population who lived in the countryside, but who almost always did not own the land, became unnecessary. Traditional ways of life and work relationships were either abandoned or adapted to meet the demands of the imposed productivist model. Many of the peasant traditions, ways of life, sociability of small farmers do not find space in this new configuration, marked by large monocultures of cereals, sugar cane and even intensive animal husbandry. Even with significant changes occurring in rural areas, it is possible to identify a significant number of small properties controlled in the form or expression of what we observe as family farming.