Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado

This article describes the financialization of work, value, and social organization in a transnational community of soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. This community originally migrated from the US Midwest to the Brazilian Cerrado in search of large tracts of cheap and productive land. While these farmers migrated to Brazil in pursuit of the reproduction of farming livelihoods and values, they adopted new forms of work, new values of farming, and new social organization on the farm. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research on two transnational soy‐farming communities in Brazil, this article analyzes the operations of capital and the emergence of financialized farming. US family farmers purchased massive tracts of Brazilian farmland for soy production, often financed by neighboring farmer‐investors, and transitioned from mid‐scale farmers to large‐scale farm managers. This transition entailed a shift in forms of work from the field to the office and a corporatization of the farm decision‐making process, shifting from family centered to investor centered. Consequently, farmers placed less value on traditional measures of a good farmer, such as yield, and greater value on financialized measures of a good farmer, including return on investment, land acquisition, and accounting practices. This research supports the framework of financialization as a situated process that emerges out of practice and reworks economic and social organization.