The Challenges for Alternatives in the Brazilian Energy Matrix: The Sustainability of Family Farming in Biodiesel Production

The paper presents results from an experience of castor beans production to obtain biodiesel, with small farmers in southern Brazil. This research provides some reflection about the family farm crisis, which has been accentuated in recent decades, because the rural aging population, as well as the lack of successors. The social responsibility to settlement people on lands is the government´s role, in this way; the agrarian policies would propose strategies to modify the productive logic inherited from monoculture production, in the southern of Rio Grande do Sul. It is essential to rethink the viability of family farming beyond funding programs of the federal government. As a result, experiences articulated with different areas of knowledge could bring innovations in the ways of generating household income to the sustainability of rural activity.