From the interior of São Paulo to the world. Unafraid.

I was born on May 10, 1969, in Araçatuba, in the interior of São Paulo state, Brazil.

The history of Araçatuba is directly linked to the northwest railroad, built in 1908. The city was named after a yellow fruit, the araçá, a name given by the Tupi people; the suffix tuba means “a lot of” in Tupi, so Araçatuba means “a lot of araçá fruit” (more about the araçá). The city lies 532 km from the city of São Paulo, averages 27 °C (81 °F) over the year, and lives on beef cattle and sugarcane.

The municipal library let you take home two books a week. That was not enough for me, so I read the others right there, sitting between the shelves. I think that is where I learned the one thing I still use every day: curiosity does not respect the limit someone wrote on the door.

That childhood had a bit of everything: judo, classical guitar, chess, mathematics with my teacher Zé Luiz and the game of Nim, and Carl Sagan and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which left me looking up for the rest of my life. And computers. Each has its own story under Interests.

From 1976 to 1983 I attended the Escola Estadual de Primeiro Grau “Luiz Gama”, and from 1984 to 1986 the Colégio Objetivo, in Araçatuba. These were the golden years of my education: great friendships and a common goal, getting into a university, which happened for me in 1987. We held each other up through the vestibular with a lot of fun, games, parties, pizzadas and travels. I made lifetime friends: Celso Akira Kajimoto, Luis Henrique Benez, Marco Antonio Coelho Goiato, Mauricio Minoru Saito, Celso Hiyodo, Cesar Mondini de Oliveira, Martha Fares de Campos, Régis Gaide Pistori, and many more. I loved physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology, and the extracurricular classes of computing and chess kept the stress of the vestibular in check.

In 1987 I entered ESALQ, the agricultural college of the University of São Paulo in Piracicaba, and graduated in Agronomy Engineering in 1991.

Not an animal scientist: an agronomic engineer. I make a point of saying it, because almost everyone assumes I came from animal nutrition. I came from soil and plants. The first two years were basic classes; in the last two I was excited about animal science, soil science and economics. They looked unrelated, but they were presented as integrated systems: biosystems, systems research, systems thinking. I only understood the linkage later in life. Dynamic, systematic integration still intrigues me.

My interest in computing grew with extracurricular courses and an internship at CIAGRI, the campus computing center: ChiWriter, WordStar, WordPerfect 5.2, Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, MASM, BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, Harvard Graphics, SAS, SANEST, Unix and more. The interns spent their days on “I-lost-everything” and “I-did-not-save-my-work” emergencies. We were computer nerds paid to rescue computer users, and we enjoyed it. It was there, as an intern at CIAGRI, that I met my wife. She was an intern too!

For my master's in Animal Science and Pastures (Ciência Animal e Pastagens), with Dr. Celso Boin and partly funded by CAPES, I studied four years of growth curves of purebred and crossbred Guzerá cows, with and without supplementation in the dry season: my first research dealing with mathematics and operational research. That is where the question appeared that I never let go of: why do two identical steers, from the same pen, eating the same ration, fatten differently? The table said they should be the same. They were not. The table described the average of a population, and I wanted to understand the individual.

In 1997 I moved to Ithaca and began a PhD at Cornell University with Dr. Danny G. Fox: a major in Animal Nutrition, minors in Animal Science and Agricultural Engineering, funded by CNPq. I defended in 2001.

I was interested in modeling nutrient fluxes and the energy and nutrient requirements of ruminants, building on operational research, calculus, digestion and nutrition, and cattle feeding in the tropics. Then came a postdoc to develop the Cattle Value Discovery System (CVDS), a dynamic growth model for cattle, and a model of forage intake by nursing calves. In 2002 I joined the Cornell faculty as a Research Associate, with my name on the door: I revised the CNCPS rumen model to predict ruminal pH and volatile fatty acids, revised the feed library and the growth model, developed diet optimization, improved the nitrogen model, and built a CVDS for beef and dairy cows.

I like to undo the idea that this was a leap. In a report from 1997, written while I was still in Piracicaba, there was already a paper in preparation signed with Dr. Fox. The bridge existed before the move. That is how these things really happen: nobody gets invited for writing a pretty letter. Someone opens the door, you are already doing the work, and someone notices.

Nobody puts the part that hurts on a CV, so I will put it here. The language: writing science in English is not speaking English, and my first manuscript came back covered in red. The distance: family, friends, weddings, funerals. That bill is not paid once; it is a monthly installment, for decades. And the time: eight years between arriving in Ithaca and holding a permanent position, three of them on a contract that could simply not be renewed.

I had many hard days in Ithaca, and out of them came a saying I still repeat. Things get hard, sometimes very hard, and there are days when we feel tired and discouraged. It is OK to give up. For five minutes. Let the tiredness come, feel the discouragement. Then go back to work.

In August 2005 we moved to College Station, where I joined Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science. Associate professor in 2010, full professor in 2015.

I left Ithaca convinced I had left snow behind forever. In February 2021 it found me, and plenty of it. Other winters have brought snow and freezing rain too. Between the temperate and the subtropical, anything is possible: all four seasons in a single day. It is a good metaphor for a career: you change places, but the problems that are yours come with you.

My work fits in one sentence: give each animal what it needs, no more and no less, and be able to predict it before feeding it. That became software, free at the Mathematical Nutrition Models website and used on farms in many countries. A model published in a paper is an argument. A model someone downloads and uses on a farm is a tool. I have spent my career trying to turn arguments into tools. More on the Work page.

And tools travel on their own. I never asked to speak anywhere; the invitations came because the models were already in use. In Sardinia, a collaboration with Dr. Antonello Cannas, of the University of Sassari, began in 2005 and continues today. Out of it came the Small Ruminant Nutrition System (SRNS), the small ruminant model behind the 2007 NRC. A long collaboration is not sustained by projects alone. It is sustained by friendship, by visits, by bringing the family along, and by a great deal of good food.

Recognition comes late

When recognition comes, it comes in a slightly comic way. In 2022, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Animal Science in Oklahoma City, my face appeared printed on a cardboard cube in the lobby of the convention center. It was the Bouffault International Animal Agriculture Award. It rewarded exactly the travel, the collaborations and the Brazilian students of twenty years, none of which I ever did with an award in mind.

Always coming back

For many years I thought I had left Brazil in 1997. Seen from a distance, I clearly had not. I coordinated a Brazil–United States consortium, funded by CAPES and FIPSE, that brought Brazilian undergraduates to the United States. Since 2011, every summer, I take American students the other way, to learn about ruminant production in Brazil. Many of the visiting scientists in my group have been Brazilian. That was not a plan. It was gravity. Pirassununga, Viçosa, Botucatu: over the years, Brazilian institutions have welcomed me and my students the same way the program at ESALQ once welcomed me.

I do not have a seventh rule about work-life balance, because that one I did not get right. But I have one certainty: time with family is never time lost. A career will demand trips, deadlines and nights, and it will keep demanding them. It is the family that does not wait. Nicole's graduation, in 2020; Nicole receiving her Texas A&M ring, in 2023. No paper, no award, is worth more than being there on those days.

So when I talk to students, I always end the same way. I am from the interior of São Paulo, from Araçatuba. There is no right place that good science has to come from, and nobody needs permission to go. The world is big, but not that big, and it belongs to no one.

Go. Unafraid. And, if you can, come back and tell the story.