From Drilled: The Carbon Gold Rush

Summary

Podcast Summary: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Episode: From Drilled: The Carbon Gold Rush

Release Date: May 19, 2026

Host: Amy Westervelt (Drilled); featured by Tim Harford (Cautionary Tales)

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Overview

This episode, a collaboration between Drilled and The Intercept Brazil, dives deep into the entangled world of “sustainable” fuels, focusing on how American agricultural power brokers are exporting their “carbon capture” vision to Brazil. The narrative follows Bruce Rastetter, an Iowa pig and corn magnate, and his quest, alongside powerful Brazilian partners, to turn Brazil into the “Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels.” The investigation reveals how technologies branded as solutions to the climate crisis can often reinforce the interests of big agriculture and oil, with dubious benefits to people and planet.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Exporting “Green Tech” to Brazil (03:10–06:43)

• In September 2025, Brazilian officials visited North Dakota to observe new “green” carbon capture technologies used alongside ethanol production.
• The goal: mimic US success in Brazil, positioning the country as a champion of sustainable aviation fuel—heralded as a “win-win” for industry and environment.
• The reality behind “carbon capture”: The supposed captured CO₂ is often injected underground to help extract more oil—questioning its climate credentials.
• Quote: “If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk, thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.” (04:25, Amy Westervelt)

2. The Controversial Pipeline & Its Champions (04:25–08:20)

• Summit Carbon Solutions has spent years trying to build a carbon capture pipeline—“The Midwest Carbon Express”—amid fierce bipartisan opposition in the US Midwest.
• Bruce Rastetter, a key figure, is both a celebrated and maligned agri-businessman in Iowa and a major owner of a burgeoning Brazilian ag company.
• The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the next big boost, forging new incentives for corn ethanol producers—provided they adopt carbon capture strategies.
• Quote: “Without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy. That’s what lowering carbon scores…this project on the pipeline is about.” (08:02, Bruce Rastetter)
• The scheme is replicated in Brazil, with Rastetter’s company (FS Fueling Sustainability) pushing similar approaches.

3. The Making of Lucas do Rio Verde: A Company Town for Agribusiness (09:14–13:30)

• The team investigates Lucas do Rio Verde—a planned agricultural boomtown in Mato Grosso, Brazil, built to serve modern agribusiness.
• A giant pig statue (“Little Lucas”), reflecting both the region's roots and the influence of German immigrant families, stands as an unlikely local mascot.
• The town sells itself as a “city of opportunities,” but every feature—from hospitals to palm-lined streets—exists to serve industrial agriculture.
• Quote: “Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners.” (11:54, Felipe Sabrina)

4. The Human Side: A Migrant’s Story (13:30–15:43)

• Isabella, a migrant from Minas Gerais, shares her story of moving to Lucas for work and finding a city defined by grain giants but also, surprisingly, decent public services—usually delivered through public-private partnerships with agribusiness.
• The town’s hospital (with a wing named for Bruce Rastetter) becomes a symbol of agri-business power buying goodwill and legitimacy.
• Quote: “If Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that’s focused on women and children.” (16:07, Amy Westervelt)

5. Mato Grosso’s History: From Rainforest to Row Crops (19:28–22:10)

• The state of Mato Grosso split half-and-half between agriculture and rainforest, but its current form was shaped by a military-era colonization campaign to “integrate” the Amazon into Brazil’s economy—displacing Indigenous communities and sponsoring massive land grabs.
• The Franz Brothers, key Brazilian partners of Rastetter, initially moved to the area as state-backed “pioneers.”
• Connections with American politicians (notably Terry Branstad, then Iowa governor) and agribusinessmen fostered international business links.
• Quote: “The main farm towns in Mato Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian government.” (19:28, Amy Westervelt)

6. Enter the Middlemen: The Story of Corey Melby (22:10–28:33)

• Agriculture consultant Corey Melby played “fixer” for Americans—including Rastetter—seeking land and contacts in Brazil’s boom years.
• Melby’s account, corroborated by extensive newsletters and on-the-ground work, details how land deals between American and Brazilian players kicked off a “cycle three” of agroindustrial development: deforestation and cattle (cycle 1), soy/corn expansion (cycle 2), and now, industrial value-added processing (cycle 3).
• Quote: “I have that 25-year arc of experience now of the good, bad and ugly of Mato Grosso. And believe me, there’s plenty of all of it.” (25:04, Corey Melby)

7. Reputation, Escape, and Global Influence (28:55–30:21)

• Rastetter’s expansion into Brazil coincided with mounting backlash in Iowa over failed large-scale land grabs (notably in Africa) and opposition from both left and right to his domestic projects.
• Brazilian opportunities offered a place where his controversial business model was less tarnished and even celebrated—his power immortalized with hospital wings and public works.
• Quote: “It’s just…that’s what he does. Whether it was in Iowa with how he was treating Iowa farmers, or now it’s globally. Yeah, he just keeps pushing his business advancement. Right? It’s all about his corporate profits.” (29:16, Jess Mazur, paraphrased in narration)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Some of it would surely still stay underground. And if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution.” (04:01, Amy Westervelt)
• “It’s managed to do what almost no politician…has been able to do in the US for years—unite far left and far right populists. People from both sides hate this pipeline.” (05:26, Amy Westervelt)
• On Lucas, Brazil: “Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge…There is no vegetation…just monoculture crops and imported palm trees.” (11:54, Felipe Sabrina)
• About Bruce Rastetter’s strategy: “Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil…if I had the choice of being in a place where everybody hated me and a place where people fawned over me, I’d probably go to people fawned over me.” (29:40, Amy Westervelt, paraphrasing Jess Mazur)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:10 – Setting up the US ethanol/carbon capture export to Brazil
• 04:25 – Iowa resistance to carbon capture pipelines and Bruce Rastetter’s role
• 07:33 – US Inflation Reduction Act: a new lifeline for ethanol, with implications in Brazil
• 09:14/11:06 – The making of Lucas do Rio Verde and its symbolism in agri-business
• 13:30 – Migrant experience in Lucas and the social role of agribusiness
• 19:28 – Mato Grosso’s history: state colonization, agrarian transformation
• 22:10/25:04 – Cory Melby’s “fixer” insights and three waves of industrial farming
• 28:55–30:21 – Rastetter’s escape from a troubled domestic reputation to new international ventures

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Episode Tone and Style

• Investigative and skeptical, with an underlying sense of irony and caution about “greenwashing”
• Rich in character studies, historical detail, and ground-level observations
• Frequent interplay between English and Portuguese, reflecting bilingual and cross-cultural reporting
• Emphasis on the complexity of “solutions” that may simply perpetuate old extractive paradigms, even under a new name

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Conclusion

This episode offers a revealing and sobering glimpse behind the curtain of global “green” industry. It highlights how the same interests dominating the American Midwest are now shaping Brazil’s agricultural present and future—all under the banner of climate innovation. A must-listen for anyone interested in the economic, social, and moral crosswinds of climate policy and global agribusiness.

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Listen to Drilled’s “Carbon Cowboys” for the full investigative series.

Transcript

[A]

Pushkin hello, Tim Harford here, briefly stepping aside from my usual role of documenting failures of the past to point you towards someone who's uncovering spectacular failures as they happen. Her name is Amy Westervelt and her show is called Drilled. It's an investigative podcast about climate change. Not the science of it, but the politics and the money and the spin. This season, Carbon Cowboys follows a new type of clean energy project in Brazil, one that promises to turn the country into, quote, the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels. What could possibly go wrong? It's the kind of story cautionary tales listeners will recognize, powerful people, a compelling vision and some uncomfortable questions lurking just beneath the surface. Enjoy the episode and if you want to hear more, find Drilled wherever you get your podcasts and hear episodes early and ad free with Pushkin Plus. Available on Drilled's Apple podcast show page or Pushkin FM Plus.

[B]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[A]

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[C]

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[B]

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[D]

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[A]

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[B]

In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission. They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. The idea behind this new technology was simple. When you turn corn into ethanol, it generates carbon dioxide. And that's a problem if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now people from Iowa to North Dakota were capturing that carbon dioxide, storing it, and selling it. Never mind that they were selling it to people who would inject it underground to get more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground. And if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution. The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea had a lot riding on these officials, believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol was a great green success story. Win, win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned the local newspapers, they might have found a different story.

[E]

If you live in Iowa, your land,

[B]

your water, and your voice could all be at risk, thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. You know, essentially paying him to capture CO2 at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere, many states away. On September 2, the Brazilian contingent met with an Iowa company called Summit Carbon Solutions. Summit has been trying for years to build a carbon capture pipeline to connect dozens of ethanol plants from Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project. Harold Ham, who controls many of North Dakota's oil fields and is an energy advisor to President Trump, is a major investor in the company. Bruce Rastetter is the company's co founder. He's also founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's managed to do what almost no politician, issue, or campaign has been able to do in the US for years. United far left and far right populace. People from both sides hate this pipeline. For Rastetter, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa. Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're going to get a response. Jess Mazur is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club, Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she dealt with Bruce Rastetter. They know who it is, and they go, oh, know that guy did this or that guy put a factory farm near my house. Or he's the one that, you know, got Iowa State in trouble. So I think everyone's got an opinion of him. And he's really, really good at being able to avoid ever having to be in the public. He doesn't get interviewed. He doesn't take media requests.

[E]

Kind of secretive.

[B]

He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa. Rastetter got his start as a big hog farmer. From there, it wasn't a big leap to growing corn. And then, like a lot of corn growers, that led quickly to getting into the corn ethanol business. As a longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its carbon footprint is similar to regular gas. It requires around 30 times as much land as solar, plus lots of water and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But industrial agriculture gets loads of subsidies from it, so they're always finding a way to keep it Alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its latest lifeline.

[D]

The Inflation Reduction act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. It contains sustainable aviation fuel. We think that's an incredible part of decarbonizing the planet.

[B]

The Inflation Reduction Act. Biden's big climate policy created a whole new revenue stream for the corn ethanol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Rastetter to the rescue.

[D]

So I think without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy. So that's what lowering carbon scores this project on the pipeline is about, with 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular, Iowa.

[B]

Summit Carbon Solutions still talks about the project today as a way to open up new markets for Iowa corn farmers. So the company was caught off guard when people across multiple states began organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express. And it quickly became a big problem because Rastetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. His company was also the majority owner of a Brazilian ag company, FS Fueling Sustainability. And he'd helped to make corn ethanol a thing in Brazil, too. Now Summit is trying to make carbon capture happen there, too. Welcome to Drilled Season 15 Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season, we've partnered with the amazing reporters at the Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there.

[F]

I'm Felipe Sabrina with the Intercept of Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of this season over on the Intercept Brazil feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of Corn in Brazil and how a

[B]

bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and ag industries got rebranded as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush. A few months ago, Felipe started telling me about this giant pig statue that greets people near Bruce Rastetter's home base in Brazil. Because, yes, his partners in Brazil also started out as pig farmers. These guys are all still in the pig business, and boy, do they love pigs. When Felipe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I was kind of shook. If you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue, think again. This is a massive porky pig looking thing wearing lederhosen and a bright green hat holding a corn cob.

[F]

And it even has a name, Lukinha, or Little Lucas. Because the town is called Lucas do Hioverde, it tells you actually a lot about this place. It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area, big agriculture business guy. He comes from a German family, which is why the pig is wearing a German outfit. Around 50 years ago, the Brazilian agriculture industry came to this place looking for a cheap and easy land grab. Today, the American agriculture industry is doing the same thing.

[B]

This audio you're listening to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas Torio Verde city government highlighting the wonders of the city. The video mixes images of macaws, forests and the sunset and large cotton, soybean and corn fields. The city government wants you to know that Lucas is the city of opportunities. It has more than 95,000 inhabitants and produces more than 2 million tons of grain per year. The narrator of the video says, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil. And then the screen fills with a mix of smiling children, crops and grain pouring out of machines. Lucas, the Rioverde, is all money, growth and seas of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

[F]

The first time I visited, it shocked me to see massive crops right next to people's homes. But the more I learned about Lucas, the more it made sense. The town is a fiction designed and built by the government to impose development on this region. Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners. The wide avenues are lined with silos, agricultural machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks and real estate agencies. Trucks over 20 meters long, loaded with soybeans or corn, have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb. Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge. Because of the distances between the long avenues, the heat and the lack of trees to provide shade. The city is obsessed with imperial palm trees. There are hundreds of them in the town center and on the sides of the roads, with nothing but monoculture crops and imported palm trees. There is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extreme temperature changes. Lucas can go from freezing cold to unbelievably hot from one moment to the next. It was weird for me, but the people I spoke with here didn't seem to mind. The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas.

[B]

My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw reports about the city, which is a very good place to live, to raise children, even in terms of violence. So we packed our bags. Isabela is from Minas Terreis, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas. But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells acai bowls in front of the parking lot of a multinational grain company. Acai is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of acai cream through the fence, and the truckers pass back cash. Isabella said Lucas is great, not least because when she needs to take her kids to a public hospital, she never waits more than an hour to be seen. I don't think anyone can complain about health care, she says. The Lucas do Rioverde hospital, San Lucas in particular, is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs. Now they've opened a really nice ward at you. The whole hostel has been renovated. In fact, the new maternity ward at the so Lucas Hospital has a promotional video, too. And a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize a not so Brazilian sounding name. Bruce Rastetter, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. He wields a lot of power there, but outside the state, he's not exactly a household name. Now, suddenly, a new wing in the hospital in this Brazilian farm town was being named after this guy. How did that happen?

[F]

The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived. So our producer, Marce Riverdoz, and I just showed up to see what we could see. We talked to a hospital worker in the hall.

[B]

It's a little hard to hear there because Felipe and Marcia were trying to tape with their phone. And of course, she's speaking in Portuguese too. But when they asked her about the name of the ward, the Bruce Rastatter wing, she said it was named after Bruce, a doctor from Ohio. We're still not sure where she got that idea, but funding big public projects, especially around hospitals and healthcare is really common in Brazil. You just heard how, when telling Felipe about what she likes about Lucas, Isabella mentioned healthcare. People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So if Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that's focused on women and children. So a maternity ward checks a lot of boxes. And then we found out that the hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Rastetter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paolo, was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And to understand how Rastatter, the American farmer, ended up with a Brazilian rural maternity ward named after him, we had to figure out how the Franz Brothers fit into it and what brought Bruce to Brazil in the first place. That's coming up after the break.

[E]

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[B]

sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

[E]

Wow.

[B]

You need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these may apply. Lucas to Rio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a state that is almost exactly half agriculture and half Amazon rainforest. It used to be even more Amazon. For decades, the state was considered the frontier in Brazil. The forests were preserved and it was home to even more indigenous people than it is today. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy. It was called the National Integration Plan. The idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti development and integrate the north and Midwest of Brazil into the national economy. This propaganda film from the 70s celebrates the revolution reaching the jungle, toppling trees in favor of of roads. The goal was to develop the Amazon by building infrastructure in the wilderness, displacing indigenous residents and encouraging people from outside the region to move there, to be pioneers and go to this frontier and tame it. The main farm towns in Mato Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian government. The government offered people plots of land, housing, and sometimes even credit to move there. They even funded research to figure out how crops like soybeans and cotton could be grown in the tropical climate there. That's what brought the Franz Brothers there decades ago. And according to Paolo, it's the Franz Brothers who brought Bruce to the area. In Paolo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa and an important contact he made there. Here he is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast. Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa at the time and eventually US Ambassador to China during Trump's first presidency. Powell says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Powell says it was Branstad who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter.

[C]

Bruce is the CEO of the company, the founder. He has a huge passion for pigs and has been involved with pigs his whole life. He was a pig farmer until he started getting into ethanol, which is a very recent thing. I don't know whether, just to clarify, Americans produce more ethanol from corn than we do from sugarcane. There the philosophy, the culture, is producing ethanol from corn. So as president, I met with this Terry Branstad, who is the governor of Iowa. We met and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil.

[B]

Bruce doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about how he wound up in Brazil. Here's how he talked about it on a farming podcast a couple of years ago.

[D]

So when we sold Hawkeye to Koch

[B]

Industries, that was one of his ethanol

[D]

companies, that freed me up for the first time to do other things outside of being responsible for a larger company and started traveling to Brazil.

[B]

This is how Bruce talks about it in other interviews too. He was interested in Brazil because it's the main agricultural competitor to the US or because other US companies had done well there, etc. Etc. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paolo's differing versions of this story that our Brazil editor, Alice de Souza, found a guy with yet another version.

[D]

Is this pro Ethanol? Are you tree huggers? Are you looking at this from a negative standpoint or you. Are you looking at it from a neutral standpoint? I don't mind being neutral. I can be critical of this too. Yeah, but I'm because clients of mine have invested in upwards of a billion dollars now in my Pedrosome. I don't want to fuck this up.

[B]

That's Corey Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil.

[D]

I came from northwest Minnesota developing land. So of course when in the early 2000s, when Macro Grosso and all of this soybean expansion was taking place, I was going to be the lam guy for a group from some of the first guys I went down with. You're going to be here, Cory. Pick up the language, pick up the contacts. You could be the real estate guy. So that's where I started was from that perspective.

[B]

Full disclosure. We paid Corey Melody to be a fixer for us on the ground in Mato Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the brothers Fronds at their farm. None of that ended up panning out, but he did talk to Felipe and I and he told us a lot about how. How Bruce started out in Brazil. He also added me to his newsletter list, which is a wealth of ag knowledge about Brazil. Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder marked Corey.

[D]

So I've been on every farm in my. I wrote the. The boom times and the bus and the boom times and the bus again with all my friends. So I, you know, I have that 25 year arc of experience now of the good bad and ugly of Marco Grosso. And believe me, there's plenty of all of it.

[B]

He knows a lot about Bruce and the Franz Brothers because he did for Bruce what he's done for the past 25 years. For other Americans looking to get into the ag business in Monto Grosso, he toured them around looking for land.

[D]

Back in 2011, I was visiting Surima and he was a young, dynamic guy and he would say, cory, we're looking to develop a corn oil mill. Processing and investors are partnering that corn oil. So I was writing about this BS in my newsletters at the time and also visiting in Lucas de Alberta at the elevators at the time, talking to climbing. Oh, corn ethanol, corn ethanol. We gotta get corn ethanol here or we're going to bury ourselves.

[B]

Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American ag folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to get a sense of Mato Grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before he got a call

[D]

from you know who, Summit from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with. Bruce Rashtter and Eric, and then the whole club. I get a call from Bruce's letter email. Hey, we would like a tour of Marco Grosso. We're going to be down there for another reason. Could. Could we do something a la carte with you, Corey?

[B]

They didn't want to take one of Corey's prepackaged ag tours.

[D]

Okay, so this is 2011. We do a little quick power tour, they go home. I figured just another tour. We were looking at land. We would love to get going on some land deals.

[B]

Corey carried on thinking nothing of it, but six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Mato Grosso.

[D]

My good friend, the Franzes, you know, they were Corey, we want to get an ethanol mill going out here, but we need help. We need Americans, we need gas ethanol, etc.

[B]

Etc.

[D]

So I was telling Bruce and the guys at the time, you know, I've got friends out here that want to get into ethanol.

[B]

FYI, guys, according to Corey at the time, Bruce and the guys weren't quite ready to get into the ethanol business in Brazil. They were just looking for some farmland. Then they came back for another trip. And as Corey tells it, this is when they met the Franzes.

[D]

All of a sudden, you know, Brazilians being Brazilians, we've got a farm for sale.

[B]

Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzes, and it Kept them all talking.

[D]

Three years to close on this damn farm. But that farm purchase then opened the door with trust and capital. Hey, let's build an ethanol mill. And Lucas.

[B]

Together, the Franz Brothers had hit the big time. They were getting into business with the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. It was a whole new level, or as Corey calls it, cycle three.

[D]

Cycle one is deforestation in cattle. Cycle two is. So cycle 2.5 is soy corn. Basically, you know, the combination cycle three now gets to be what we would say, industrial or added value. No different than Iowa.

[B]

For the Franz Brothers, Bruce was a white whale. At a time of booming Brazilian industrial agriculture. He happened to have some free time on his hands. And now this international king of corn had picked them. What luck. But that story misses one important detail. At the time, he was doing land tours in Brazil. Bruce Rastatter was having a really bad time back home in Iowa. Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in Iowa. It's just that's what he does is like his business model, you know, and whether it was in Iowa with, you know, how he was treating Iowa farmers, or now it's globally. Yeah, he just keeps pushing his business advancement. Right. It's all about his corporate profits. Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which, I mean, I suppose if I was in his shoes, if I had the choice of, you know, being at a place where everybody hated me in a place where people fawned over me, I'd probably go to people fond over me. That's our story next time. We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz Brothers, Miguel Vas Ribeiro, and all summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season.

[F]

Carbon Cowboys Cowboys of the Isejado is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil.

[B]

The show was reported and written by Felipe, Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt.

[F]

Our editors are Audrey Quinn in the US And Alice de Sousa in Brazil.

[B]

Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Heverdosa and Felipe Mux.

[F]

Theme song and original music by Eric Terrena.

[B]

Additional music by Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff.

[F]

Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming.

[B]

US Fact checking from Naomi Barr.

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Brazil fact checking by Studio Frontera.

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Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Attorney Amendment Project. We are also proud members of reporter shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, president of the Intercept.

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Brazil Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries.

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Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Schrebernek, and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to the Intercept Brazil's site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed. Wherever you listen to podcasts. This summer, don't squeeze in. Spread out. Find homes big enough for your whole guest list on vrbo. From family reunions to trips with friends, VRBO has spacious summer stays for every group size and budget. That's vacation rentals done right. Start exploring on VRBO and book your next stay. Now. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.