The Amazon was opened up to development and settlement by means of Roads of National Integration beginning in 1970. Since that period, settlers have been coming to the Amazon from throughout Brazil to farm land offered by the government through colonization schemes. One of the better known of these projects, the Altamira Integrated Development Project along the TransAmazon highway, began in 1971 in the Lower Xingu Basin and along with Rondonia represented special opportunities for farmers because of the presence of better than average soils for cultivation. Over the past 30 years, settlers have come and gone in the Altamira project, and they have been studied over this entire period by the author. In this paper, a discussion of the evolution of the project is provided that reviews the deforestation and land use trajectories that have been observed using both field studies and in the past decade using Landsat data as well. A focus of the presentation will be on the data collected in the past 7 years that examines the shifts in labor supply of farmers as well as projects labor supply given current contraceptive practices and age-specific female fertility. Our field surveys suggest that modeling land use and land cover change in the Amazon will need to take into account demographic projections that are sensitive to the precipitous decline in female fertility in the Amazon, and that not taking this evidence into account is likely to result in very misleading scenarios of future land cover change.