The dry season started early, so we held back 200,000 seedlings
Rain stopped three weeks ahead of the ten-year average. We kept 200,000 seedlings in the nursery rather than plant them into ground that would not hold them.
Rain stopped about three weeks ahead of the ten-year average for this stretch of the basin. The river gauges fell with it. Planting into a false start is how you lose a year of work, because a seedling that goes into drying ground spends its first weeks under stress it never recovers from.
Tomás Ferreira walked the lower plots with Dona Marlene Souza and the Associação Raízes cooperative in the first week of May. The forecast and the gauges agreed, and so did the people who have farmed this land their whole lives. They decided to wait.
So 200,000 seedlings stayed in the shade houses rather than going into ground that would not hold them. They are watered, shaded and turned, and the nursery crews are kept on through the delay rather than stood down.
Holding stock is not free. It ties up shade-house space we need for the next cohort, it costs in water and wages, and it pushes the planting window tight against the rains when they finally arrive. We are aware that a long hold could cost us part of the season.
But losing a whole cohort to drought costs more, and it costs the cooperative's trust as well as the money. People who watched their work die in a dry spell are slower to turn out for the next planting day, and we cannot run these sites without them.
The plan now is to watch the river and the sky together and go the moment the rain is genuinely set in, not at the first shower. We would rather plant late and live than plant on time and replant.
