When high costs and low prices drained income from her family’s dairy farm, Nina Collard made a snappy decision.
She swapped the cows for crocodiles.
After seven years of investing in the pioneering project to breed rare broad-nosed cayman crocodiles in captivity, the farm sent the first batch of 150 reptiles to the butcher this year.
With 0.15 square inch of cayman crocodile skin, used to make footwear and purses, costing nearly $2 and two pounds of its almost fatless, high-protein meat over $10, Nina and her husband Glenn now expect the business to flourish.
The project started with 60 animals but now there are some 1,000 caymans in four huge greenhouses at the Bonsucesso farm in the green, hilly interior of Rio de Janeiro state.
“We are expanding further now; it’s a road of no return,” Collard told Reuters as she oversaw an employee throwing big chunks of chicken meat to the caymans over a concrete barrier.
“I hope it will be much more profitable than milk, at least this means much less workload and work force. Crocodiles don’t eat every day, in winter they eat only once in three months, and now we’re feeding them twice a week,” she said.
There are only two workers at the farm apart from Nina and her husband. As one of them throws meat into a roomy corral with a pool, the crocodiles transform from motionless green logs into lightning-fast beasts chasing food with open, toothy jaws.
Risk, stress and music
Collard says the risks of the crocodile business are hardly higher than working with cattle, so long as workers do not get over-confident and always stay alert. She chided her employee for climbing the barrier to open a window in the stuffy greenhouse, leaving a nearly 10-foot-long cayman behind his back.
“My husband got his hand mauled by a big crocodile, but that’s because he was overly confident,” she said.
She said broad-nosed caymans are particularly prone to stress, which leads to frequent fighting between them. Visits to the farm by tourists only stress them out more.
To relieve that nervousness, she put a radio in one of the greenhouses with young and active caymans.
“It’s playing music all day and basically allows them to get used to voices, but who knows, maybe the music itself is good for them,” she said. Crocodiles listen to anything from samba to rock and from evangelical hymns to hip-hop.
Pro-environment
So far, the farm has been surviving mainly as a tourist attraction, offering paid excursions. But it also received some financial aid as a conservation project that breeds crocodiles for skin and meat, thus reducing incentives for poaching the species in the wild.
The government’s environmental agency, Ibama, endorses the Bonsucesso project. Independent environmentalists generally also endorse or at least are not openly opposed to it.
“The skin and meat trade goes this way so poaching halts,” Collard said. She is proud that the project contributed to removing the broad-nosed cayman from the list of species on the brink of extinction, at least in Brazil.
Prof. Luciano Verdade from the animal ecology laboratory of the Sao Paulo State University said four crocodile farms were now successfully working, including the pioneer Bonsucesso. This cayman’s habitat is the decimated Atlantic rainforest.
His laboratory provided the first crocodiles for farming. Work started in the 1980s when the broad-nosed cayman faced extinction and captive breeding was seen as a way of saving the species. After a while scientists decided that it would survive without reintroduction of caymans into the wild.
“That could introduce new pathogens, so it was decided to provide a reproducer for commercial use,” Verdade said. He said the farms now contribute, directly and indirectly, to scientific research and monitoring of the caymans in the wild.
Verdade said Brazil’s caymans from the Pantanal marshlands in Mato Grosso state accounted for 80 percent of the world crocodile skin market in the 1980s, when poaching in the area peaked at about 1.5 million animals killed every year.
But later legalized mass production in countries such as the United States, Australia, Colombia and Venezuela made poaching barely profitable. It still exists and concerns environmentalists, but it is way below 1980s levels.
Legal crocodile ranches exist in Pantanal, but farmers there harvest eggs from the wild. Verdade said the area, with the biggest crocodile concentration in the world, could allow crocodile hunting to control numbers, but that would require changing the laws, which he said were “very conservative.”
Lucrative products
Also, while the Pantanal cayman’s skin is bony and only parts of it are usable in the leather industry, broad-nosed caymans have a higher quality skin, all of which can be used.
Some Brazilian restaurants serve crocodile meat as a delicacy, tasting between chicken and fish. There are also footwear companies in southern Brazil that make shoes and boots of crocodile leather.
