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Agency costs and organizational architecture of large corporate farms: Evidence from Brazil

April 2017
International Food and Agribusiness Management Association 20(2):201-219

DOI:10.22434/IFAMR2016.0009

Project: Large Scale Agricultural Holdings in Emerging and Industrialzed Countries (LaScalA)

Authors:

Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies

Drawing inspiration from American institutionalism and new institutional economics, this paper discusses the rise of large corporate farms as the transition from the classic capitalist firm to the corporate form of organization based on the separation of ownership and control. Three case studies from the Brazilian cerrado show the rise of large corporate farms to be enabled and impelled by the advance of agricultural production technologies and the search for scale economies. The key finding from the case studies is that complex technology not only necessitates large-scale farming but also generates technical and organizational solutions to the potentially pervasive agency problems. In addition to the use of sound corporate governance practices, these solutions include organizational architecture encompassing computer-aided accounting and budgeting systems, incentive-based compensation, clear definition of performance goals, and delegation of operational decisions to farm managers. Furthermore, organizational architecture has been shown to promote a culture of trust and accountability, which counteract the opportunistic tendencies of farm managers and workers.

. Summary of case studies.

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201

International Food and Agribusiness Management Review

Volume 20 Issue 2, 2017; DOI: 10.22434/IFAMR2016.0009

Received: 14 January 2016 / Accepted: 10 October 2016

OPEN ACCESS

Agency costs and organizational architecture of large

corporate farms: evidence from Brazil

Special issue: Agroholdings and mega-farms in a global context

CASE STUDY

Fabio Chaddada† and Vladislav Valentinov b

aAssociate Professor, University of Missouri and INSPER, 125 Mumford

Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA; †Deceased

bResearch Associate, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition

Economies, Theodor-Lieser-Str. 2, 06120 Halle, Germany

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from American institutionalism and new institutional economics, this paper discusses

the rise of large corporate farms as the transition from the classic capitalist firm to the corporate form of

organization based on the separation of ownership and control. Three case studies from the Brazilian cerrado

show the rise of large corporate farms to be enabled and impelled by the advance of agricultural production

technologies and the search for scale economies. The key finding from the case studies is that complex

technology not only necessitates large-scale farming but also generates technical and organizational solutions

to the potentially pervasive agency problems. In addition to the use of sound corporate governance practices,

these solutions include organizational architecture encompassing computer-aided accounting and budgeting

systems, incentive-based compensation, clear definition of performance goals, and delegation of operational

decisions to farm managers. Furthermore, organizational architecture has been shown to promote a culture

of trust and accountability, which counteract the opportunistic tendencies of farm managers and workers.

Keywords: corporate farms, separation of ownership and control, organizational architecture, corporate

governance.

JEL code: D23, L22, Q13

Corresponding author: valentinov@iamo.de

http://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/pdf/10.22434/IFAMR2016.0009 - Wednesday, April 05, 2017 11:46:46 PM - Leibniz-Institut fuer Agrarentwicklung in Mittel- und Osteuropa (IAMO) / Bibliothek IP Address:192.124.243.110

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1. Introduction

The rise of large industrialized corporate farms is a well-documented trend in the evolution of agricultural

organization all over the world. These farms are not only quite visible today but will likely become even

more widespread and important in the future. The driving forces of this trend in different parts of the world

vary and include, for example, food price volatility, technical change facilitating the supervision of the

production process, existence of benefits from horizontal and vertical integration, deficiencies of public

infrastructure, requirements of certification and traceability, as well as inelastic labor supply (Deininger and

Byerlee, 2012). For all their heterogeneity, these forces lead to the same effect: they facilitate and indeed

require large-scale business organization. This effect is known to cut the ground from under the prevalent

transaction cost economics argument about the superiority of family farms (Allen and Lueck, 1998; Pollak,

1985). Large corporate farms evidently do not enjoy the transaction cost advantages of family loyalty in the

organization of agricultural production activities that are very costly to supervise.

Drawing on an extensive literature review, Deininger and Byerlee (2012: 706) identify three advantages

of this kind in traditional family farms. First, family members involved in the farm business have strong

incentives to do their best since they are also residual claims to profits (and losses). Second, they benefit from

‘an intimate knowledge of local soil and climate, often accumulated over generations.’ And finally they can

flexibly adjust their labor supply to the seasonally contingent conditions of production (cf. Allen and Lueck,

1998; Pollak, 1985; Valentinov, 2007). It is clear that the rise of the large-scale industrial agriculture poses a

challenge to these arguments. The advantages of the owner-managed family farm may be real, but the driving

forces behind the recent rise of large corporate farms may decrease the relevance of such advantages over

time. Interestingly, the issue of the transaction cost advantages of large farms surfaced in the agricultural

economics literature more than a decade ago in the context of the agricultural restructuring in the Central

and Eastern Europe (cf. Rozelle and Swinnen, 2004). Valentinov and Curtiss (2005) related some of these

advantages to the broader institutional environment of agriculture, while noting that the traditional rationale

for family farming tends to be based on intra-organizational terms.

This argument seems to remain relevant today, with the qualification that institutional environment factors

must be seen to be acting in concert with the evolution of technology, very much along the lines of Hodgson’s

(1988) observation that both institutions and technology present exogenous parameters that are likely to

be neglected by orthodox economics. The essential institutional environment factors that were conducive

to the rise of the modern large-scale farms include ‘market failures related to availability of infrastructure,

technology, and property rights’ (Deininger and Byerlee, 2012: 701), but also the failures of capital and

credit markets. The effects of these factors are further enhanced by the technological developments that

helped to obviate the need for close supervision of hired labor. Far from being theoretically predetermined,

the comparative efficiency of small and large farms thus emerges to be contingent not only on the intra-

organizational considerations but also on the state of the broader institutional environment and technology.

Acknowledging this contingence, however, does not mean denying the importance of the agency problems

that must be faced by large corporate farms. Even if innovative technologies indeed largely reduce the

transaction cost advantages of family farms, it is still not clear how large corporate farms manage to achieve

effective organization of their production activities. In contrast to corporate farms, family farms embody

the ideal of the classic owner-managed capitalist firm which creates stronger incentives for owners to

internalize the wealth effects of their actions than alternative firm types do, such as corporations, public firms,

and non-profits (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972; Furubotn and Pejovich, 1972; Valentinov et al., 2015). The

organization of corporate farms obviously rests on the separation of ownership and control, and thus on the

divergence of interests between owners and managers (Berle and Means, 1932). This divergence is bound to

cause agency problems posing a serious challenge to the viability and efficiency of corporate farms. These

problems, however, are not necessarily fatal and can be addressed by appropriate governance instruments.

The aim of this paper is to draw on three case studies of large Brazilian corporate farms in order to explain

the governance instruments allowing these farms to keep their agency problems in check.

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The case studies have been inspired by the idea that the mitigation of agency costs is a challenge that is faced

not only by corporate farms but also more generally by corporations which present the dominant form of

business organization in the Western world (Hansmann, 1996). The rise of corporations has been a premier

field of study by American institutional economists throughout the twentieth century. While Berle and Means

(1932) acknowledged that corporations are radically different from classic capitalist firms, Galbraith (1967)

attributed the rise of corporations to technological imperatives, and more specifically to the tendency of

modern technology to require large-scale business organization. As Allan Gruchy (1972: 142) put it, ‘the

large corporation must plan to minimize risk by controlling its sources of supply, the demand for its products,

the sources of its capital, and fluctuations in its prices’.

It is true that the planning required of large corporate farms must deal with additional agriculture-specific

issues such as site and season specificity of production, tacit knowledge, imperfections of capital and risk

markets, environmental and labor regulatory contexts, as well as pioneering and developing costs. Yet, the

institutionalist emphasis on the role of technology still seems to retain its validity in the agricultural context too.

If the benefits of corporate planning are not attainable without the separation of ownership and control, then

ownership may be seen as a ‘ceremony’ hindering the advance the progressive technologies (cf. Gruchy, 1972;

Hodgson, 2004; Samuels, 1995). In this line, Clarence Ayres (1978), a classic of American institutionalism,

argued that the logic of technological development calls for the weakening of the institution of ownership

if this institution becomes obstructive. He saw the rise of corporations as a crucial manifestation of this

weakening: ‘so great has been the proliferation of technical instruments and skills in modern business that

‘management’ has come to play a constantly increasing part in its conduct, and ‘ownership’ a correspondingly

decreasing part’ (ibid: 199). The case studies in the present paper demonstrate that the Ayresian dialectics

of ‘management’ and ‘ownership’, despite its radical flavor, lines up remarkably well with the current

governance practices of Brazilian large corporate farms.

In interpreting corporations as an institutional response to technological imperatives, American institutionalists

unfortunately paid less attention to the micro-analytic issues of agency costs and opportunistic behavior

more generally, leaving this terrain to new institutional economics. The present paper draws on both of these

schools of thought in order to make the case that the technological imperatives not only give a boost to the

separation of ownership and control but also facilitate the emergence of governance instruments that are

able to mitigate the agency problems resulting therefrom. These governance mechanisms will be referred

to as ‘organizational architecture’ and will be shown to play a crucial enabling role in the operation of large

corporate farms. Based on case studies of three of such farms operating in the Brazilian agricultural frontier

with different types of potential agency problems between owners, managers, and farm workers, the paper

describes how these problems are mitigated by organizational architectures.

2. The context: agricultural development in the Brazilian cerrado

Before describing the structures of large corporate farms, it is important to understand the context from

which they emerged. This section provides a brief analysis of agricultural development in the Brazilian

agricultural frontier and how the structure of agricultural production evolved over time. Brazilian agriculture

has experienced significant growth in the last four decades. Between 1975 and 2010, total agricultural

production in Brazil grew fourfold, making it a top-five producer of 36 commodities globally by 2008 (Rada

and Buccola, 2012). As a result of impressive productivity gains, which averaged 3.0% per year since 1975,

Brazil was able to achieve food security, real food prices decreased, and the country became one of the main

agricultural producers and exporters in the world.

This agricultural production growth occurred primarily in the cerrado region. The cerrado is a savannah-

like vegetation of low trees, scrub brush and grasses. It occurs entirely within Brazil and covers 204 million

hectares or 23% of Brazil’s land area. Until the 1970s, the cerrado was considered to be of limited value for

agricultural production. Major constraints to agricultural production in the cerrado included acidic soils with

low natural fertility and high biological pressure of pests, diseases and weeds. The development of the Brazilian

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cerrado into productive agricultural land required a portfolio of technologies, including the introduction of

new plant varieties and hybrids adapted to low latitudes, investments in soil fertility improvements, strategies

to control diseases, pests and weeds, use of no-tillage systems, and integrated crop and livestock production

systems. These technologies developed over the last 40 years removed the constraints to producing high-

yield crops and livestock in the poor, acid soils of the cerrado under tropical conditions.

Following these agricultural technology developments, the cerrado was opened up to agriculture and new

land was brought into production. Between 1975 and 1996, the area in planted pastures soared from 18 to

49 million hectares and the area used for row crop production increased from 9 to 13 million hectares. As a

result, about 40% of the cerrado had been converted to agricultural land by 1995. The development of the

cerrado into new agricultural land was responsible for the largest share in food production between 1970 and

1990. Since then, most of the production increases in the cerrado was due to yield growth. Grain production

in the cerrado increased from 8 million tons in 1970 to 48 million tons in 2006. In 2006, the cerrado produced

89% of the cotton, 69% of the sorghum, 55% of the beef, 53% of the soybeans, 48% of the coffee, 37% of

the rice and 30% of the corn produced in Brazil (Mueller and Martha Jr., 2008).

Since the cerrado is such a vast biome, this paper focuses on how agriculture developed in the state of Mato

Grosso, which has become the leading crop producer in the country in the last decade. Table 1 shows the

evolution of farming in Mato Grosso since the 1970s. In 1975 total land in farms was about 22 million

hectares or 24% of the state’s landmass. But only 12 million ha or 54% of the land in farms were actually

cleared of natural forests and used in production, of which 8.6 million ha were in natural pastures, 2.6 million

ha in planted pastures and 500,000 ha in temporary and permanent crops. At that time the state did not have

adequate infrastructure and was isolated from the rest of the country. In addition, the agricultural technologies

adapted to the tropics developed by Embrapa and other research institutes were yet to be developed and

disseminated. Thus farming activities in the state of Mato Grosso were predominantly extensive cattle

ranching and staple crops for subsistence both with low levels of productivity.

This situation started to change with a set of policies implemented by the military regime that aimed to

integrate the Legal Amazon1 to the rest of the country with the enactment of the National Integration Plan

(PIN) in 1970. These policies included infrastructure development (primarily roads), tax exemptions for

enterprises investing in the region and subsidized credit. The early beneficiaries of these policies were cattle

development projects. In addition to large-scale cattle ranching projects, PIN also included development

initiatives as a response to a widespread drought in the Northeast region, which increased the incidence of

poverty and famine among peasant farmers. State-led colonization projects were designed to settle poor

1 In order to implement its development policy, the Brazilian military government created the Legal Amazon, a region that includes the states of

Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Roraima, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, and Maranhão west of the 44th meridian.

Table 1. Evolution of agriculture in Mato Grosso, Brazil (IBGE, 2006).

1975 1985 1995-1996 2006

Number of farm establishments 56,118 77,921 78,762 112,987

Total land in farms (ha) 21,949,146 37,835,651 49,839,631 48,688,711

Area cleared in establishments (ha) 11,767,758 18,559,984 24,471,635 28,559,105

Permanent crops (ha) 42,174 136,605 169,734 408,550

Temporary crops (ha) 459,093 1,992,838 2,782,011 6,018,182

Natural pastures (ha) 8,640,861 9,685,306 6,189,573 4,404,283

Planted pastures (ha) 2,602,607 6,719,064 15,262,488 17,658,375

Number of employed farm workers 263,179 359,221 326,767 358,336

Number of tractors 2,643 19,534 32,752 42,330

Number of beef cattle 3,110,119 6,545,956 14,438,135 20,666,147

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farmers and landless individuals in the Legal Amazon. Major state-led colonization projects settling more

than 5 million hectares were implemented in the 1970s and 1980s.

Private colonization projects organized by colonization firms and cooperatives were also relevant agents of

agricultural development in the Legal Amazon. These private colonization entities surveyed, demarcated

and occupied land, built infrastructure, opened roads, developed urban areas, and provided basic health and

education services to smallholders that migrated primarily from the southern region. Thirty-five private

enterprises organized 104 settlement projects and colonized almost 4 million hectares of farmland in Mato

Grosso between 1970 and 1990. Private colonization in Mato Grosso represented 39% of the total area

colonized in the Legal Amazon. Jepson (2006a,b) provides detailed accounts about the role of private

colonization projects in the Legal Amazon. She concludes that, ‘state incentives were, in fact, insufficient

to cause the frontier expansion. Central to Brazil’s frontier historical geography are private colonization

cooperatives and firms, both of which developed into critical organizations in the process of agricultural

expansion’ (Jepson, 2006a: 858).

As a result of these policies to develop the Legal Amazon, the number of farm establishments in Mato Grosso

increased from 56 to 78 thousand and the total land in farms almost doubled from 22 to 38 million hectares

between 1975 and 1985 (Table 1). During this period, the area actually used in production increased from

11.7 to 18.5 million hectares with notable increases in planted pastures (from 2.6 to 6.7 million ha) and

temporary crops (from 460,000 to 2 million ha). Many critics of these policies argue that this first phase

of agricultural development in the cerrado led to excessive land clearing, environmental degradation and

increased land concentration (Klink and Machado, 2005). The poor soils of the cerrado could not sustain

adequate levels of productivity after three years of being used in production. Without investments in soil

fertility, natural pastures would degrade and row crops would not produce enough to cover costs, leading

famers to abandon the land.

The integration and development policies initiated by the military government were, however, short lived.

In 1979 Brazil experienced the effects of the second oil crisis, which severely affected the ability of the

government to invest in proactive development policies. Government expenditures in agricultural policy

reached their peak in the 1980s and were significantly reduced after that (Chaddad and Jank, 2006). Following

restoration of democracy in 1985, subsequent policies related to the development of the Amazon region

cut subsidies and tax incentives to agricultural projects and started to pay more attention to environmental

issues, the protection of indigenous land rights, and land reform. Substantial tracts of cerrado and tropical

rain forests in the Legal Amazon are now off limits to agricultural expansion and remain protected in nature

conservation units and indigenous reserves. Land reform settlements also started to be implemented in the

1990s to address the issue of land concentration.

A second major push to agricultural development in the cerrado occurred after the economic reforms of the

1990s. The Real Plan of 1994 played a critical role in agricultural development throughout the country with

currency stabilization and the control of inflation. Initially, the Real Plan led to a crisis in agriculture as a

result of an overvalued currency but the currency devaluation of 1999 under a free-floating exchange rate

policy – coupled with increased international demand for agricultural commodities in the 2000s – provided a

massive boost to agricultural development. Also, since the mid-1980s, new agricultural technologies started

to become available to farmers in the cerrado, which led to the development of commercial agriculture and

ranching with increasing levels of productivity.

Between 1985 and 2006, the area with planted pastures in Mato Grosso increased from 6.7 to 17.6 million

hectares and the number of beef cattle increased from 6.5 to 20.6 million head (Table 1). The beef cattle

herd reached 28 million head in 2014 with beef production representing 20% of the state’s gross value of

agricultural production. The improvement of forages, coupled with appropriate soil management practices,

solved the issue of pasture degradation and significantly improved the economic prospects of cattle ranching

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in the region. With the expansion and increased productivity of cattle herds in the cerrado, Brazil has become

the second largest producer and the leading exporter of beef in the world.

Even more impressive than the growth of the livestock sector has been crop production expansion – in

particular, soybean, corn and cotton. Between 1985 and 2006, the area planted with temporary crops in Mato

Grosso tripled from 2 to 6 million hectares (Table 1). Recent data show that crops continued to expand in

the state, with planted area reaching 13 million hectares and total crop production of almost 48 million tons

in 2014 (Table 2). Agricultural production growth resulted from planted area expansion and productivity

gains, which increased from 1.4 tons per hectare in 1977 to 3.6 tons per ha in 2014. Mato Grosso surpassed

Paraná as the country’s largest producer and currently accounts for 25% of the domestic grain and oilseed

production. The state produces 30% of the Brazilian soybean crop, 23% of the corn crop, and 58% of the

cotton crop. In 2014 crop production represented 74% of the state’s gross value of agricultural production,

with soybeans alone accounting for 50% of the total value.

In what follows, we take a closer look at the organization of agricultural production in Mato Grosso. Initially,

smallholders who migrated from southern Brazil formed colonization and production cooperatives to address

the market failures and transaction costs they faced in the frontier. These cooperatives are analyzed in section

2.1. Subsequently we discuss the structural changes that occurred in Brazilian agriculture since the 1990s

and how they led to the demise of most cooperatives. Without the services provided by cooperatives, most

family farmers found themselves in a difficult situation to access credit and technology, store and market

production and cope with the market failures and lack of infrastructure typical of agricultural frontiers.

Intense competition for land and commodity price volatility further undermined family farm survival. The

gap left behind by cooperative failures was partially addressed with the emergence of large family groups,

corporate farming structures and new generation cooperatives.

The first wave of cooperatives in Mato Grosso (1975-1995)

Mato Grosso attracted a large number of migrants from several parts of the country – but primarily from the

southern and southeastern regions – in the 1970s and 1980s. These pioneers were smallholders who sold

small farms in their region of origin to pursue the dream of becoming commercial farmers in the agricultural

frontier. However, they faced several constraints in the frontier, including poor infrastructure, missing services,

market failures and high transaction costs to obtain farm inputs and market production.

Table 2. Evolution of crop production in Brazil and Mato Grosso (Conab, 2015).1

1976/77 1984/85 1994/95 2004/05 2013/14

Brazil

Planted area (1000 ha) 37,314 39,693 38,539 49,068 56,988

Crop production (1000 tons) 46,943 58,143 81,065 114,695 193,386

Productivity (kg/ha) 1,258 1,465 2,103 2,339 3,393

Mato Grosso

Planted area (1000 ha) 2,238 1,561 3,278 8,564 13,323

Crop production (1000 tons) 3,046 2,642 7,617 24,731 47,703

Productivity (kg/ha) 1,361 1,693 2,324 2,878 3,580

1 Includes 15 crops.

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Based on case studies of a private colonization firm (called CONAGRO) and a colonization cooperative

(called COOPERCOL), Jepson (2006b: 301) concludes that:

private colonization projects provided the initial conditions of settlement by accessing state subsidies

and securing property rights in the region. Moreover, private colonization lowered the risks and

transaction costs of frontier settlement through financial support during unproductive years. It was

the promise of secure titles (and lower enforcement costs), combined with access to state loans, that

made it economically feasible for smallholders to invest in mechanized commercial agriculture in

a frontier region.

These private colonization organizations played a critical role in providing the initial conditions for families

to migrate from the south to the agricultural frontier. However, poor transportation infrastructure, distance to

markets, insufficient grain storage, and high transaction costs to obtain credit and farm inputs were common

challenges of the early colonists. Consequently, they decided to organize an agricultural cooperative to

overcome these market failures and provide the missing services they needed to be successful (cf. Valentinov,

2009).

Founded in 1975, COOPERCANA played a central economic role in regional development as follows (Jepson,

2006b). First, it invested in warehouses and grain storage facilities across the region. The cooperative stored

the grain, initially rice, and marketed the production to the government under the minimum price program.

In doing so, it enabled the farmers to have access to governmental subsidies, which they otherwise would

not have. The cooperative also assisted the farmers in accessing subsidized credit from Banco do Brasil.

The state bank funneled the total value of loans to the cooperative, which then redistributed the funds to the

farmers. COOPERCANA also provided farmers with agricultural inputs and agronomic services to plant

and harvest rice. Inputs were supplied at a discount for cooperative members, which reduced the need for

farmers to travel to Barra do Garças, the main local market located 300 km away from the settlements.

COOPERCANA also disseminated information about suitable agricultural practices for production on poor

cerrado soils. Lastly, the cooperative provided emergency flights on its DC-3 to Barra do Garças during the

rainy season, when the main unpaved road (BR-158) connecting the settlements to the town was flooded.

In the early 1980s, COOPERCANA was instrumental in helping the farmers improve soil fertility and thus

decrease dependence on rice with production diversification. Based on agronomic recommendations from

Embrapa, the cooperative provided lime, chemical fertilizers and technical advice to encourage farmers

to invest in soil fertility and avoid soil degradation. As farmers invested in soil fertility, the cooperative

introduced new crops in the region. The cooperative technical staff experimented with new soybean and corn

cultivars and tested their yields under different growing conditions. In collaboration with Embrapa research

staff, COOPERCANA implemented crop experiments and provided important agronomic information to

farmers. New technologies were disseminated to farmers in field days and educational programs. With the

availability of adapted cultivars and credit for soil improvement, agricultural production and productivity

in the region increased dramatically. Between 1983 and 1993, soybean area increased from 5,000 hectares

to 40,000 hectares, while corn area increased from 700 hectares to 3,000 hectares.

Production growth and agricultural development in eastern Mato Grosso provided the impetus for the

growth of COOPERCANA in the 1980s. In addition to the services provided to farmers explained above,

the cooperative diversified and engaged in several vertical integration projects upstream and downstream

in the value chain. These growth projects included the following: lime processing and marketing; corn, rice

and soybean seed production and marketing with own brand name; seed quality laboratory to test seeds from

third party vendors; a network of supermarkets and gas service stations; and a livestock processing plant to

become a local supplier of beef and pork.

COOPERCANA was not a unique example. Several multipurpose, local cooperatives were formed in the

1970s and 1980s across Mato Grosso by the early pioneers. Because these pioneers came mostly from the

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southern region, the cooperatives they formed followed the traditional model of the cooperatives they knew

or were members of in southern Brazil. This first wave of cooperative development in the cerrado was also

influenced by increased federal intervention in cooperatives that lasted until 1988. Federal law 5764 of 1971

established the institutional framework within which the Brazilian cooperative system operates until today.

The 1971 law defined the legal status of cooperatives and set strict rules for their formation and functioning.

Between 1966 and 1988, a state agency known as Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária

regulated and controlled agricultural cooperatives.

Despite their early successes, COOPERCANA and most of the first wave cooperatives formed across

Mato Grosso went bankrupt in the early 1990s. There were several exogenous and endogenous factors

that led to their demise. With unsustainable debt levels, these cooperatives could not survive the period of

hyperinflation of the late 1980s and the economic liberalization and macroeconomic reforms introduced in

the early 1990s. Farmers, in turn, also suffered from the economic crisis and the end of agricultural subsidies

and many were forced to exit agriculture. In addition, there were some serious management and governance

issues that prevented these cooperatives from taking the necessary steps to reinvent and survive the crisis

(cf. Valentinov and Vacekova, 2015).

Structural changes and the emergence of corporate farms (1990-2015)

With the failure of cooperatives and the consequent exit of farmers in large numbers in the 1990s, the structure

of farming became increasingly concentrated in Mato Grosso. Data from the last Census of Agriculture

show that the average farm size in the state is 431 hectares (Table 3), which is significantly higher than the

national average of 64 hectares. About 70% of the producers in the state farm less than 100 hectares. These

farm establishments include traditional smallholders and peasants who were settled in land reform projects

since 1995. The total land in smallholder farms adds up to 2.6 million hectares, equivalent to 5% of the total

agricultural land in the state. Among commercial producers, there are three size categories: small (100-500

ha), medium (500-2,500 ha) and large (above 2,500 ha). The 35,000 commercial producers in Mato Grosso

farm 45 million hectares or 95% of the agricultural land in the state.

There are about 10,000 commercial producers in Mato Grosso farming an average of 1,100 hectares (Table 3).

They are family farmers that were able to survive several crises since the 1980s and establish themselves as

commercial producers. Our field research in Mato Grosso suggests that 500 hectares is the minimum efficient

scale that a producer needs to farm to be able to acquire the machinery, build the on-farm infrastructure and

have access to modern inputs to make a living in commodity agriculture in the cerrado. These small and

medium-sized family farmers overcame collective action problems and the negative consequences of the

cooperative failures of the 1990s and formed 43 new cooperatives since then. These second-wave cooperatives

are structurally different from the traditional cooperatives of the 1970s and 1980s and focus on organizing

producer pools to buy farm inputs and market agricultural commodities with larger volumes. They have a

limited effect on market structure and performance due to their limited scale and resources (Chaddad, 2016).

Table 3. Farm structure in Mato Grosso (2006) (IBGE, 2006).

Number of establishments Area

n Share (%) Total area (ha) Share (%) Average area (ha)

0-100 ha 77,786 68.8 2,641,168 5.4 34

100-500 ha 21,334 18.9 4,503,981 9.3 211

500-2,500 ha 10,052 8.9 11,316,022 23.2 1,126

>2,500 ha 3,815 3.4 30,227,539 62.1 7,923

Total 112,987 100.0 48,688,710 100.0 431

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Other producers, however, were able to achieve a much larger scale than this. Table 3 shows that there are

about 4,000 large commercial producers in Mato Grosso with an average farm size of 8,000 ha. These large

producers farm about 30 million hectares or 62% of the land in farms in the state. According to primary

data collected by Agroconsult, a consultancy firm, there are 38 ‘mega producers’ farming more than

30,000 hectares in the cerrado region with several of them farming more than 100,000 hectares. A recent

phenomenon that is changing the structure of agricultural production in the Brazilian cerrado is the emergence

of corporate farms since the commodity super cycle started in 2005. These new players include publicly traded

companies, privately held companies controlled by private equity funds, and subsidiaries of multinational

trading companies. These corporate farms with diverse ownership arrangements have three characteristics

in common – very large scale, professional management and access to capital markets (Chaddad, 2014).

3. Case studies of family groups and corporate farms

There are two basic types of very large producers operating in the Brazilian cerrado: family groups and

corporate farms. The dominant form is the family group, where multiple family members farm together in

areas ranging from 5,000 to 250,000 ha. These family groups were developed since the 1990s by the second

and third generation sons and daughters of the first generation pioneers as an organizational response to pool

resources and cope with the market failures, transaction costs, poor infrastructure, market volatility and lack

of credit in the agricultural frontier. On the other hand, corporate farms financed by public and private equity

markets were formed in the mid- to late-2000s to benefit from the commodity boom of the time.

In what follows, the paper describes three case studies – one family group (Produzir), one publicly traded

corporation (BrasilAgro) and one privately-held corporation controlled by private equity funds (Agrifirma)

The ownership structures are different but all involve the separation of ownership and control in the sense

that owners are not involved in operating and managing the farms. The case studies also describe how these

very large producers attempt to ameliorate agency problems with organizational architecture. The case studies

were developed based on personal interviews with corporate managers (chief executive officers (CEOs),

chief financial officers (CFOs), chief operating officers (COOs)), farm managers who run the farms and

several visits to farms in Mato Grosso and western Bahia. The personal interviews were complemented with

information from company documents, such as incorporation statutes and bylaws, annual financial reports

(when available) and presentations to investors.

Produzir S.A.

Eugênio Pinesso was the son of an Italian immigrant couple that arrived in southern Brazil in the 1930s to

work as sharecroppers on coffee plantations. Eugênio grew on the farm in northern Paraná state and, despite

not going to school, was a shrewd businessman who was an early adopter of several new technologies. He

learned how to bring low-fertile soils in to production. With hard work and a bit of luck, he was able to

make it as a commercial farmer in southern Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1983 Eugênio took the bold

decision to exchange 5 farms totaling 1,500 hectares in Paraná for 2 farms with 19,600 hectares in Campo

Verde, MT located 100 km to the east of Cuiabá, the state capital. The farms were not yet developed so

family members worked hard to clear the land and bring it into production. Eugênio had 6 daughters and

sons and most family members were involved in agriculture. They worked as a team. While some family

members worked in developing land into crop production in Mato Grosso, other family members stayed in

Since we conducted the personal interviews and collected data to write these case studies in 2014, a lot has changed in Brazil. In 2015, the country

entered a deep recession with high inflation and currency devaluation. Some farm operators who were leveraged in dollar-denominated debt found

themselves in financial distress. Many had to declare bankruptcy, merge with another entity or liquidate. The economic crisis persisted in 2016

with high political risk because Congress started an impeachment process against the President that was only resolved in August. At the same time,

farmers in western Bahia suffered three years of drought that significantly affected yields. And, for the first time many farmers in Mato Grosso

also had poor soybean yields due to lack of rain. One of the three corporate firms described in this paper was forced to liquidate not because of the

financial and production risks described above, but simply because one of their majority shareholders decided to cash in and leave the partnership.

Suddenly, the managers of the firm were left without funding to carry out the business plan for the 2015-2016 crop year and thus the company was

folded. This story highlights the importance of a robust capital structure to the survival of start-up farm corporations.

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Mato Grosso do Sul focusing on livestock production, including hogs and beef. One of the key features of

large producers in the cerrado is that they developed as family groups, pooling resources from many family

members under the leadership of one trusted individual. With the passing of his wife in 1986, Eugênio started

to groom one his sons, Gilson Pinesso, to take over his role as the family leader.

In 1993 the Pinesso Group took another bold step with the acquisition of a 61,000-hectare farm in Nova

Ubiratã, MT located 150 km to the east of Sorriso in an area without any infrastructure, including roads and

electricity. The land was developed over time and required investments in basic infrastructure, including

building more than 200 km of roads, bridges, housing, electricity and a school for rural workers and their

families. In 2014 the district developed by the Pinesso Group had a population of 2,000 with a school, health

center, pharmacy, supermarket and service station. The farm currently produces soybeans, corn, cotton,

sunflower, beef cattle, and hogs.

In 2014 the Pinesso Group had 10 farms in the cerrado totaling 108,000 hectares. It also leased 48,000 hectares

in the new frontier state of Piauí. Planted area with crops increased from 48,000 ha in 2005 to 117,000 ha

in 2014. The area used for livestock production in planted pastures comprised 35,000 ha.

■Separation of ownership and control and the potential for agency problems

In 2012 the Pinesso Group incorporated and changed its name to Produzir S.A., which literally means ‘to

produce.’ All assets were transferred to the corporate entity and family members received shares in return.

Produzir S.A. has 6 shareholders, each a limited holding company controlled by the 6 siblings (or their

descendants). The family group decided to incorporate for two main reasons. The first was to give shares to

family members, which would allow exit at fair value. The second was to enable the firm to adopt corporate

governance practices and hire professional managers. The board of Produzir S.A. is comprised of six

directors nominated by each family holding company (the shareholders) and one independent, professional

director. A CEO with professional experience in finance was hired to run the business. According to one

family member, ‘we needed someone from outside the family to make business decisions with cold blood

and without emotion.’

■Organizational architecture

The CEO also plays the role of CFO and the company also hired two additional senior-level professionals – a

COO to run the farming operations and a Chief Commercial Officer in charge of commercial and marketing

decisions. This senior management team is assisted by 6 mid-level managers, 4 of which are responsible

for managing crop operations and 2 in charge of the livestock operations. The firm has 1,050 employees

with about 110 of them involved with some management or administrative function. As a result of these

organizational changes, family members are no longer involved with the business. The senior management

team receives incentive compensation based on clearly defined goals, including revenue growth and profits.

In a personal interview, Mr. Pinesso explained how the family (represented in the Board of Directors) was

able to oversee such a large farming operation. In simple terms, he stated that, ‘in agriculture, it is the eye of

the owner that fattens the ox.’ Even though the family is not directly involved with the business operation,

family members constantly visit the farms and develop personal relationships with farm managers and

workers. ‘We have formed our team over the last 30 years. Today we have the sons and daughters of our

first employees working in our firm. They have a sense of belonging to the group and we offer a lot of

opportunities for personal growth and development.’

In addition to a strong organizational culture based on personal relationships, Produzir S.A. has adopted a

control system with key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the performance of its production units across

the cerrado. ‘We benchmark the performance of each production unit relative to the others, which provides

a strong incentive for the teams to perform. The managers of these production units also share information

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and best practices among themselves.’ The firm also introduced an incentive compensation system for farm

managers based on production and productivity levels achieved by each production unit. In other words, the

organizational architecture of Produzir is based on both trust built by years of relationship between family

members and farm managers and workers, coupled with formal control mechanisms (benchmarking across

operational units and incentive compensation).

A recent phenomenon that is changing the structure of agricultural production in the Brazilian cerrado is

the emergence of corporate farms since the commodity super cycle started in 2005. Corporate farms are

increasingly found in Mato Grosso, but especially in the new agricultural frontier of the cerrado known as

Mapitoba, a region comprising four states – Maranhão, Piauí, Tocantins and western Bahia. These new players

include publicly traded companies (e.g. SLC Agrícola, Vanguarda Agro, and BrasilAgro), privately-held

companies controlled by private equity funds (e.g. Agrifirma, Agrinvest and Tiba Agro), and subsidiaries of

multinational trading companies (e.g. Ceagro-Mitsubishi and XinguAgri-Multigrain). These corporate farms

with diverse ownership arrangements have three characteristics in common – very large scale, professional

management and access to risk capital from outside investors. In what follows, we describe these emerging

corporate-style structures.

Companhia Brasileira de Propriedades Agrícolas S.A. (BrasilAgro)

BrasilAgro is a publicly traded company headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil and listed in the Bovespa stock

exchange with American Depositary Receipts traded in the New York Stock Exchange. Its 2006 initial

public offering (IPO) raised 584 million BRL (about 286 million USD)

from investors based on a business

plan and a promise ‘to create value by acquiring, developing and operating properties through sustainable

and innovative practices.’ The firm did not have any assets and employed only 2 managers at the time of

listing. Since then, it has become one of the leading agricultural land development and farming companies

in South America.

The core business of BrasilAgro is the acquisition, development, operation and sale of rural properties

suitable for agricultural production. Once BrasilAgro acquires a rural property, it invests in infrastructure,

facilities and technology necessary for efficient agricultural production. It then engages in high productivity

agricultural operations aiming to maximize cash flow per area. BrasilAgro selectively divests of a farm when

it reaches its optimal value to capture capital gains. The company combines the returns generated from land

value appreciation and farming operations, while mitigating production risks with geographic diversification.

Its vision is ‘to be the leading platform for investing in and developing farmland in Brazil.’

With the capital raised in the IPO, BrasilAgro acquired 11 farms in agricultural frontier regions throughout

the cerrado. After taking possession of its first farm in July 2007, the firm planted 22,000 hectares in its

first year of operation. The planted area increased every year since then reaching 80,000 hectares in the

2013/2014 crop year. In 2014 BrasilAgro had a land portfolio of 8 farms with 180,000 hectares with an

estimated market value of 1.3 billion BRL (about 381.8 million USD). Three farms had already been sold

allowing the firm to realize considerable capital gains.

■Separation of ownership and control and the potential for agency problems

The idea for the formation of BrasilAgro came from a group of investors led by Cresud, a diversified real

estate development firm in Argentina with a business unit in farming. Cresud is currently the controlling

shareholder in BrasilAgro with a 39.6% stake in the company. The remaining shares are traded in the Bovespa

stock exchange and are held by minority shareholders. BrasilAgro is listed in Bovespa’s New Market,

which requires high levels of corporate governance practices and transparency. With the decision to list in

3 BRL = Brazilian Real; conversion to USD calculated on the basis of the exchange rate on November 30, 2016.

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the New Market, BrasilAgro was able to raise capital at a competitive cost as it offered more security and

transparency to investors.

Corporate governance practices attempt to ameliorate the potential agency costs between shareholders and

corporate managers. The Board of BrasilAgro is composed of nine directors, of which three are independent.

Together, the Board of Directors and the Board of Executive Officers are responsible for managing BrasilAgro.

The Board of Directors is responsible for establishing long-term strategies and setting general business policies

and guidelines. Professional executive officers are delegated responsibility for the day-to-day management of

BrasilAgro’s business following the resolutions of the Board of Directors. The Board of Executive Officers

is comprised of four professional managers led by Mr. Julio Piza Neto, the firm’s CEO.

The cornerstone of the business model developed by BrasilAgro is its large size, which enables it to benefit

from economies of scale. According to Julio, economies of scale are realized at two levels: the farm level

and the corporate level. Farm-level economies of scale include the following: fixed cost dilution (such as

overhead expenses and compliance costs with labor, environmental and tax laws that were exceedingly

high in Brazil); ability to attract and retain professional managers and experienced technical staff to run

each farm; efficient use of on-farm facilities and infrastructure; and operational efficiencies of modern farm

equipment. Economies of scale at the corporate level include commercial advantages in buying farm inputs

(e.g. volume discounts) and in negotiating commodity prices or forward contracts (due to higher bargaining

power). Its size and access to capital allow BrasilAgro to invest in modern information and communication

systems and to develop knowledge to make better commercial and risk management decisions. Perhaps more

importantly, size and scale lead to a lower cost of capital and the reduction of price and production risk due

to geographic and product diversification.

■Organizational architecture

To benefit from these potential economies of scale, the major challenge confronting large corporate farms

like BrasilAgro is that the owners (shareholders) are not involved in the major operations and are distant

from the farms. This separation of ownership and control gives rise to conflicts of interest and agency costs

between owners, managers and farm workers. These agency costs are potentially very severe in agriculture

because of the unpredictable effects of Mother Nature. Julio believes that it is possible for a corporate farm

to overcome agency costs and thereby achieve high performance by means of a well-designed organizational

architecture. The organizational architecture of BrasilAgro includes a hierarchical structure with well-defined

responsibilities and communication channels between the corporate team in São Paulo and managers at each

farm, formal control systems, and incentive compensation based on key performance indicators.

The formal organizational structure of BrasilAgro comprises the central office (headquarters) in São Paulo

and local offices in each farm. The central office includes the top management team and staff organized by

function. Each farm is a separate business unit and profit center with its own budget and performance goals.

Each farm office is headed by a farm manager, with decision making authority over farming operations,

assisted by a deputy farm manager, an administrative officer and a chief of field operations overseeing a

team of field staff. In decentralizing operational decisions to farm managers, the company attempts to benefit

from effective and timely use of local, specific knowledge. However, decentralization of decision-making

requires effective coordination and communication between farm managers and staff at the central office.

The organizational architecture of BrasilAgro is designed to facilitate seamless coordination between the central

office and each farm manager. Information and computer technologies allow direct, real time communication

between farm managers and staff in the central office. Each farm has a scale to weigh everything arriving at

(e.g. fertilizers, chemicals) and leaving (e.g. grains) the farm gate to enforce a strict control of inventories

of farm inputs and output. The key feature of BrasilAgro’s architecture is a control system called PGP (an

acronym for production planning and management), which provided the basis for evaluating performance,

incentivizing and holding employees accountable.

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At the core of the organizational architecture is a focus on formal systems and processes geared to foster a

culture of accountability and meritocracy. The Chief Administration Officer and his team are in charge of

developing a management control system based on formal processes and protocols called the PGP. In the

PGP system, each activity conducted by the firm, from land acquisition to land development and farming, is

standardized in a formal process with steps and KPIs. For example, KPIs for a corn field includes distance

between seeds, number of seeds planted per row meter, fertilizer weight applied per row meter, number of

drops per cm

(for pest control) and corn weight loss per hectare. This formalization and standardization

of all farming activities serve as the basis for planning, budgeting, control, incentive and performance

evaluation systems.

Planning of farm operations is the first step in the PGP system, which is the responsibility of the top

management team with input from farm managers. First, the COO and the chief technology officer plan

operations for each farm from a technical perspective following best agronomy practices. The first draft of

the plan is discussed with farm managers to receive their input and buy-in. From this interactive, participatory

process emerges the operational plan for each plot on each farm along with a budget. The operational plan

and budget for each farm then receives the input from the CEO and the head of BrasilAgro’s new business

development team. They review the technical plan from a strategic perspective focusing on expected margins

and profitability for each crop. In other words, they consider economic variables to maximize expected returns

on each farm. The outcome is an operational plan and budget that seeks to maximize cash flow generation

for each plot in each farm considering the constraints imposed by technical feasibility. The operational plan

includes the crops to be planted in each plot, the use of inputs and technology, and a detailed agenda (with

dates and KPIs) for each activity to be performed on a field from soil preparation to harvesting.

Each farm manager leads a team of field staff responsible for the execution of farming operations following

the operational plan and the budget. According to Julio, ‘the beauty of our PGP system is that each farm

plot has an owner.’ He does not mean that workers own land but rather that all activities performed on a

farm plot are traced back to a single person who is held accountable for her actions. Since the PGP describes

operations and KPIs for each farm plot, he believes that BrasilAgro is able to monitor and control from a

distance the effort and efficiency of each worker and thus minimize potential agency costs.

Execution of the plan is monitored in real time by the central office staff with the use of information and

communication technologies. When an operation is performed, the responsible field staff for that operation

updates the PGP system. As a result, the central office in the city of São Paulo has real time information

about operations carried out in every plot of every farm across the country. Field staff is also responsible for

making decisions on the field if any change to the operational plan is required. For example, if weather is

not appropriate for a certain scheduled operation, field staff has the decision-making authority to postpone

it – for example, to delay crop spraying when it rains. But a decision to change the operational plan due to

some unforeseen contingency must be justified in the PGP system. Since BrasilAgro has weather stations in

each farm plot, the central office staff has up-to-date weather information to monitor and control execution

of operations. Taken together, the operational plan and this control system foster a culture of accountability

among field staff.

Another key feature of the PGP system is that the operational plan is tied to a budget. Each farm operation

is linked to a required quantity of inputs (such as seeds, fertilizers, chemicals, fuel, etc.) and machinery use.

The field staff responsible to perform an activity (e.g. corn seeding) requests the necessary materials (e.g.

corn seeds, tractors, seeding machine, diesel, etc.) from the farm office to perform that operation. Based

on an enterprise system developed by SAP (SAP SE, Walldorf, Germany), a German multinational firm,

which integrates each farm with the central office, the use of requested materials for a given activity triggers

a reduction in inventories and an update to the budget. While the PGP system enables physical control of

operations, the SAP system provides a platform for financial control. The central office consolidates all these

pieces of information from the PGP and SAP systems for control and reporting purposes.

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The PGP system also serves as the basis for BrasilAgro’s incentive system. For example, the variable pay

of senior staff, farm managers and field staff is partially based on how well the operational plan and the

budget are executed. More specifically, the performance of each farm manager is assessed by the executive

committee based on several objective and subjective performance indicators, including: operational yield

(hectares planted and productivity per hectare) compared to budget; SMS (safety, environment and health);

adherence to the PGP system including participation in the planning phase, execution of activities according

to the operational plan and entry of information about activities performed in the fields into the PGP system;

actual vs budgeted costs; and a qualitative assessment of dedication, effort and creativity. The performance

of field staff is also evaluated on the basis of safety, environment and health indicators and adherence to the

PGP system. The compensation package of farm managers and field staff is based on a fixed salary (65% of

total compensation) and a variable pay (35% of total compensation) based on formal performance evaluation.

Agrifirma Brasil Agropecuaria S.A.

Agrifirma was formed in 2008 with capital provided by RIT Capital Partners and Lord Rothschild, both

private equity firms headquartered outside Brazil. In 2011 it received another large investment from BRZ

Investimentos, a large Brazilian private equity firm. The current ownership structure of Agrifirma includes

two controlling shareholders – Genagro (a holding company owned by the initial investors – RIT and

Rothschild) and BRZ – and a group of minority investors. These are all ‘passive investors’ in the sense that

Agrifirma is just one asset in their diversified portfolios. As is the case with private equity firms, they have

a limited horizon of 7-8 years after which they expect to exit with considerable capital gains.

The business model adopted by Agrifirma is very similar to the BrasilAgro described above – to acquire

cheap farmland in the Brazilian cerrado, make the necessary investments to bring the land in to production

and then maximize cash flow from farming operations. Since 2008, Agrifirma has bought 70,000 hectares

of farmland in western Bahia, in three clusters of about 20,000 hectares. In 2014, Agrifirma planted 23,200

ha including soybeans, corn and cotton.

■Separation of ownership and control and the potential for agency problems

As is the case with BrasilAgro and Produzir, Agrifirma owners (shareholders) are not involved in the

business. Each majority shareholder (Genagro and BRZ) appoints two directors to the Board, which also

has three seats for independent directors. The board of directors meets on a quarterly basis to set policy

and monitor business performance, but they are not involved in managing the business. Despite not being

a listed company, Agrifirma follows corporate governance rules in terms of transparency and disclosure to

minimize conflicts of interest between shareholders and senior management.

■Organizational architecture

The corporate structure based in São Paulo is comprised of the board of directors and a senior management

team of 4 professionals (CEO, CFO, COO and legal counsel) assisted by support staff. The firm estimates

that this corporate structure costs about USD 60 per hectare and serves the purpose of providing a governance

structure to attract investor capital at low cost. As the firm grows with the acquisition of more farmland, this

corporate cost is expected to be diluted. ‘Our corporate costs are heavy given the current size of our farming

operations. This is why growth is crucial for Agrifirma in the future,’ according to Fabiano Costa, the CFO.

The COO, Rodrigo Rodrigues, oversees all farming operations conducted in the three clusters in western

Bahia. The field staff includes 30 managers responsible for basic administrative functions (e.g. human

resources, accounting, finance, commercial, etc.) and 450 farm managers and workers. Each farm cluster

is managed by one farm manager, who reports directly to the COO. The organizational architecture at the

farm level is very similar to BrasilAgro, including a hierarchical structure, formal budgeting and control

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systems, and performance-based compensation. According to Rodrigo, the major challenge of Agrifirma is

to recruit, develop and incentivize human resources.

Agriculture is not a one-man show. You have to develop a good team to execute the business plan

laid out by the board of directors. Unfortunately in Brazil, especially in remote frontier regions like

western Bahia, talent is a scarce resource. It will take time, patience and commitment to form a team

and an organizational culture focused on delivering results to shareholders.

Agrifirma estimates that overhead costs associated with farming operations are about USD 100-120 per

hectare. According to Rodrigo,

organizational architecture is the backbone of any large scale, corporate farming entity. It is a substitute

for the personal ties and informal organization of traditional family farms. However, it takes time to

develop because there is a learning curve. The difference is that formal organizational architecture

is scalable. Once you make it work, there is no limit to how large you can grow.

4. Discussion

Table 4 summarizes the main organizational characteristics of the three case studies from the Brazilian

cerrado. First, despite the fact that each firm adopts a different ownership structure, they all share the same

common characteristic – the separation of ownership and control. The owners provide risk capital but are

not involved in management decisions. The separation of ownership and control allows these large corporate

farms to access risk capital from outside investors – e.g. capital markets, private equity firms – and to hire

professional managers. However, it introduces conflicts of interest between owners and managers – i.e. the

classic principal-agent problem.

The second organizational characteristic shared by corporate farms is that they adopt sound corporate

governance practices, including a board with independent directors, the separation of the roles of Board Chair

and CEO, and transparency. The objective of corporate governance is to assure investors that they will receive

a return on investment (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997) and to minimize conflicts of interest between owners

and corporate managers. Consequently, the firm is able to raise equity capital from investors at a lower cost.

A third common organizational characteristic is that corporate managers delegate operational decisions to farm

managers and workers. Although discretion of farm managers might be limited by a budget and operational

plan, there is significant scope for opportunistic behavior as pointed out in the literature (e.g. Allen and Lueck,

1998). Hierarchies, formal control systems, performance evaluation and incentive compensation are used

in combination to mitigate such agency costs between workers, farm managers and corporate managers. In

the case of the family-owned corporation Produzir, informal mechanisms based on personal relationships

appear to complement more formal control mechanisms. It remains to be seen whether a strong corporate

culture based on trust is a substitute or complement to formal organizational architecture.

Corporate governance and organizational architecture are necessary to reduce agency costs in corporate

farms, but they cost money. In fact, they constitute fixed costs that are not found in the traditional family

farm. Managers of these corporate farms are constantly monitoring such ‘bureaucratic’ costs (Williamson,

1991) on a per hectare basis and benchmark against competitors to keep them as low as possible. The

presence of bureaucratic costs in corporate farms is a major incentive for them to grow to dilute these costs

over more hectares.

In the broad spectrum of the institutionalist literature, J.K. Galbraith’s vision of industrial corporations

stands out as a particularly useful contrast with the organizational characteristics of Brazilian large farms.

As in the case with corporations studied by Galbraith, the rise of large farms is enabled and impelled by the

emergence of complex production technologies. Another similarity with Galbraith’s story is that the large

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farm size and the complexity of technology led to a shift in the power structure away from owners toward

professional managers, whom Galbraith designated as the ‘technostructure’. These similarities are reflected

in the first above-mentioned organizational characteristic related to the hiring of professional managers. It

is also important to point out that the emergence of large corporate farms in the Brazilian cerrado is also a

response to the strong competitive pressures (e.g. competition for land) and complexities (e.g. high transaction

costs, pervasive market failures, inefficient credit markets, poor infrastructure and market volatility) of

farming in the agricultural frontier, thousands of kilometers away from markets. The challenges of farming

in the cerrado, coupled with the demise of most agricultural cooperatives in the 1990s, make it increasing

difficult for the traditional family farm to survive and prosper.

In contrast to other institutionalists (e.g. Ayres, 1978; Berle and Means, 1932; Gruchy, 1972), Galbraith tended

to assume a harmonious relation between the corporation and the technostructure, whose ‘members seek to

adapt the goals of the corporation more closely with their own; by extension the corporation seeks to adapt

social attitudes and goals to those of the members of its technostructure’ (Galbraith, 1967: 217). In addition,

he did not see a serious conflict potential in the relationships between the technostructure and the workers. In

Brazilian corporate farms, the potential for conflicts of interest and opportunistic behavior between owners,

managers, and workers is apparently present but can be controlled through organizational characteristics

related to corporate governance, organizational architecture and informal control mechanisms. While corporate

governance installs a system of checks and balances to control the actual power of the ‘technostructure’,

organizational architecture creates disincentives for workers to shirk from the careful fulfillment of their

duties. It is noteworthy though that organizational architecture is by no means inconsistent with organizational

culture based on accountability and trustful personal relationships, thus providing support for Galbraith’s

vision of the convergence of various individual goals within the corporation. Corporate managers’ ambitions

Table 4. Summary of case studies.

BrasilAgro Agrifirma Produzir

Ownership

structure

• Publicly traded corporation

• One majority shareholder

• Privately-held corporation

• Controlled by 2 private equity

funds

• Family-owned corporation

• 6 family trusts are the only

shareholders

Corporate

governance

• Listed on BOVESPA new

market

• Chairman of the Board is not

the CEO

• 3 independent directors

• Company is not listed but

follows best practices in

corporate governance and

transparency

• Chairman of the Board is not

the CEO

• 3 independent directors

• Board comprised of 1

representative from each

family plus 1 independent

director

• Board delegates management

decisions to professional

managers

Organizational

architecture

• Team of professional

managers runs the firm

• Operational decisions

delegated to farm managers

• Discretion of farm managers

limited by budget and

operational plan

• Clearly-defined performance

goals

• Incentive compensation

• Team of professional

managers runs the firm

• Operational decisions

delegated to farm managers

• Discretion of farm managers

limited by budget and

operational plan

• Clearly-defined performance

goals

• Incentive compensation

• Team of professional

managers runs the firm

• Operational decisions

delegated to farm managers

• Organizational culture based

on personal relationships

• Introduction of benchmarking

between operational units and

incentive compensation to

complement informal control

mechanisms

Planted area

(2014)

• 80,000 hectares • 23,000 hectares • 108,000 hectares

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to cut bureaucratic costs through constant production growth are indicative of the forces of circular cumulative

causation, which likewise play a major role in Galbraith’s evolutionary account of corporations.

5. Conclusions

Agricultural economists tend to frame their discussions of very large farms by the conceptual dichotomies

of ‘small size’ versus ‘large size’ or family labor versus hired labor. The present paper informs the study of

very large farms by invoking a further conceptual perspective inspired by American institutionalism and

new institutional economics. According to this perspective, very large farms embody the supersession of the

classic capitalist firm (i.e. the traditional family farm), resting on the identity of the owner-manager, by the

corporate form based on the separation of ownership and control. As a result, large corporate farms face the

critical challenge of coping with the potentially pervasive agency costs. Firms adopt different organizational

architectures to cope with agency costs, including personal relationships and trust, delegation of decision

making to farm managers, performance evaluation systems, incentive compensation programs and formal

control mechanisms.

In line with the institutionalist perspective, the case studies from the Brazilian cerrado show the advance of

agricultural technology to be a key determinant of the rise of very large farms. The key finding from the case

studies is that complex technology not only necessitates large-scale corporate farming but also generates

technical solutions to the potentially arising agency problems. In addition to the use of sound corporate

governance and supply of outside capital, these solutions are presented by organizational architecture

encompassing computer-aided accounting and budgeting systems, incentive-based compensation, clear

definition of performance goals, as well as the delegation of operational decisions to farm managers.

Paradoxically, a crucial outcome of organizational architecture is a culture of trust and accountability that

is seemingly at odds with Allen and Lueck’s (1998) assumption of opportunistic propensities of hired

agricultural labor. Our case study findings lend empirical support to the institutionalist theory of self-enforcing

technological imperatives but also call attention to the institutionalist concerns about their societal effects

that may be particularly disruptive in rural areas.

Finally, our analysis informs the organization and management of large-scale farms. The introduction of new

technologies and the opportunity to benefit from economies of scale and access external finance at lower cost

to fund land development costs and production growth are the major drivers of the separation of ownership

and control. Yet, farm managers need to be aware that capital providers require sound corporate governance

practices and transparency, including board independence, the presence of external directors and the adoption

of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) accounting rules. Additionally, farm managers must face

the fact that agriculture requires the use of local, specific knowledge so that farm workers can quickly adapt

agronomic practices to changes in local conditions. Large-scale farms, therefore, delegate decision-making

authority to farm managers and workers, which introduces the classic principal-agent problem. The article

describes some informal and formal organizational solutions that can be adopted by farm managers seeking

to control this problem. While these solutions have proved to be quite effective so far, it is nevertheless well

to remember that the emergence of large-scale corporate farms in Brazil is a recent phenomenon. Only time

will tell if these solutions will remain effective in the longer term.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Dr. Chaddad

acknowledges the support of INSPER to conduct the field research and personal interviews in Brazil used

to develop the case studies. Dr. Valentinov acknowledges the support from the Volkswagen Foundation.

International Food and Agribusiness Management Review

218

Chaddad and Valentinov Volume 20, Issue 2, 2017

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