Pig farming in a border area: pictures and landscapes (west ofSanta Catarina State, Brazil – from the 1920s to the 1950s)

Abstract

This paper seeks to make some comments about pig farming as practised in the Western part of the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and the transformations in the landscape caused by this process, from the 1920s, a decade that witnessed the start of colonisation in the area, to the 1950s, when this colonisation was established. The rearing of pigs was part of the settlement process in this region from as early as the second half of the 19th Century, when pigs were raised loose, in the forests, extensively and with very little husbandry, by the caboclo population. However, this type of pig raising was destructured with colonisation, which started in the 1920s. This led to significant changes to the landscape, with the forests slowly but surely giving way to cultivation of land and production of lumber, bringing about the demise of this type of pig raising. However, pigs were also raised in the land owned by the settlers, albeit now in a closed format, where the adoption of the combination of pigs and corn made pig raising feasible. The production was for local consumption and for commercialisation in the medium-sized and large towns and cities in the South and Southeast of the country, being the base of the nascent regional agroindustrial segment. To understand this process marked by transformations in the landscape, recorded through production of pictures from the past, this research paper works with the precepts set by historical geography, starting out from the idea of indissociability between space and time.