Day 6 Brazil Contest Winner

Our first stop on this day was to visit one of the soybean growing champions of Brazil.  We traveled about 5 miles off the main road to the farmstead of the family.  They had prepared a nice breakfast of treats and drinks for us.  They described their farming operation and then went over the details of the soybean contest field that yielded 136 bushels/acre.  Some of his secrets to success were building soil fertility over a long period, minimizing compaction, superior varieties and using a special inoculant. We had the opportunity to ask many questions and then headed to the field to examine some of his variety plots and the new contest area.  The growing season has been wet and the soybeans were tall and lodging with a fair amount of white mold.  We also noticed that the lower nodes on the bottom 10 inches had few pods.  They attributed this to wet weather after emergence.
From there we headed to lunch in Guarapuava.   This town was mostly a German immigrant city that was started with the immigration of 500 German families in 1951.  After lunch we visited the Agraria Coop.  This is a modern and innovative coop that has 600 members.  It has a corn mill, malt facility, soy crushing plant, feed mill, seed production facility, dairy and hog slaughtering facility.  In addition they have a private research foundation called FAPA that supports growers with applied research and advisory services.  The cooperative is able to coordinate the entire production process from planting to harvest to processing to marketing the end products.  A quality control lab ensures that products are high quality.  This is much different from Pennsylvania where these are disconnected.

From the Coop we visited the FAPA research center where they were preparing for a large field day.  We had some indepth discussions of disease and weed management with their scientists.  There is a real need here to use IPM to manage weeds and diseases.

After the meeting we headed to the hotel and then to a German restaurant/microbrewer where we had a short tour of the brewery and a traditional German meal.

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day 5 Franke Dijkstra

On day 5, we left Curitiba and traveled an hour or so to another town called Ponto Grossa to visit a famous no-till farmer named Frank Dykstra and his son Richard and grandson Edward who operate two farms on his land now. Frank has been to Pennsylvania and knows Steve Groff and Sjoerd Duiker. Frank also emphasized the need for IPM in managing insects and diseases.  We were joined by several Embrapa representatives who showed us some of the insects in the field and also what soybean rust looks like.  Frank also discussed in detail the local cooperative and the relationship between the farmers and the cooperative. Their cooperative is a valuable tool for their production.  They market grain, sell fertilizer, develop value added opportunities and also conduct considerable research as part of an independent foundation called the ABC Foundation which is funded by the farmers. Their work is used as a basis of variety selection and pesticide recommendations on many farms here.

  We had a nice description of the farming operation by Richard and then a presentation on the evolution of no-till in Brazil by Frank.  They grow soybeans, corn and edible soybeans in the summer and wheat, barley in the winter. They use black oats in the winter and pearl millet in the summer as cover crops. Frank emphasized that Brazilian soils are fragile and prone to erosion.  Also residue decomposition is high, so you need to maximize the return of crop residues to the field.  After the presentation, we toured some of the soybean fields on the farm.  The farm has much more rolling land than we saw in the Cerrado and was much like Pennsylvania in that regard. 

After lunch at a local hotel we participated in a discussion and presentation on sustainable soybean production with researchers from Embrapa Soybeans.  We reviewed the critical need for IPM, importance of roots and straw in no-till Brazilian soybean production.   We also learned about inoculant use here and some of the new combinations that they are working with.

In the late afternoon and evening we met with several Monsanto representatives led by Antonio Pierro who were arranged by Jim Valent, one of our tour participants who also works for Monsanto.  They took us to a farm where they are doing work with variety evaluation and introduction their Climate program and Fieldview software. The farm owner and his son Cassio Kossatz presented their operations.  The farm was also striving for high soybean yields.  Cassio has been equipping all of his machinery with GPS to develop mapping for each operation and using Field View to link all of the data together. Precision ag here is a few years behind the US but catching up rapidly.

Day 4 Natural Resource and Port Visit

On day 4 our plan was to visit the port of Paranagua to get an appreciation of the soybean export trade. The port of Paranagua is about an hour drive across a coastal mountain range from Curitiba where we are staying.  Most of the soybeans in this state of Parana must be trucked through this mountain range to the port.  To get to the port, we arranged to take a tourist train through a national park refuge in the Atlantic forest.  The train trip lasted four hours and allowed us to see the lush rain forest in the coastal mountain range.  As we headed down, we saw many spectacular views of the rugged landscape.  The tour ended in a small town called Morretes near the port city of Paranagua where we had lunch at a local restaurant.

Our next stop was the port of Paranagua.  Paranagua is the most important grain port in South America.  It is a multi-modal port for imports and exports.  They work with soybean, soybean meal, sugar, corn, fertilizers, salt, frozen products (poultry) and vehicles. More than half of the raw material for fertilizer for Brazil comes through this port. 16% of Brazils GDP moves through this port. They work 24 hours a day in four shifts. The receiving capacity is about 2800 trucks a day.  Brazilian soybean trucks have up to 9 axles in tandem rigs that hold up to 70 metric tons.  We saw many of these making their way to the port down a winding interstate through the mountain on the way home.

At the port we arranged for a boat to give us a tour of the ships loading at the docks.  We saw soybeans, sugar, and containers being loaded on 10 ships at the same time.  Tugboats move the ships off the docks during an hour long process. It takes 45 days for these ships to get to China and 15 days to get to the US.   We watched one ship leaving the port and could see others in the distance waiting to come in.   

Day 3 Brazilian Ag Economics and Policy

We got up early and headed on a domestic flight south to Curitiba.  Once we got settled into another hotel the  group was able to meet with Pedro Loyola the technical economic department coordinator for the equivalent of our Farm Bureau. It was  lengthy discussion about the total Brazilian Ag situation.

Pedro detailed that Brazil is ranked 2nd in corn and soybean production in the world.  If you check out his slide you will also note some surprising information on other commodities as well such as milk and chicken.
According t o Peddro, the myth of the continuing  deforestation of the forested areas (including the Amazon) is simply not true. However the farmers he represents are under pressure about the environmental regulations.  In fact 65% of the land is in forest today. Regulations also are enforced to keep forests on each farm as something they call The Forest Code.  A farmer in the Amazon needs to maintain (on his or her own money) 80% of his owned land in forested natural areas! In other biomes this requirement is different.  In Parana, for example, the forested requirement is 20%. He was a strong advocate for public education and outreach to better educate critics of Brazilian Agriculture. We were amazed by the total Ag production however they do have many challenges.  Once of which is their transportation system and storage of grains. 

Day 2 Agricola

We started with a visit to the SLC group, one of the largest agricultural groups in Brazil, in the Pamplona farm.  This was one of fifteen locations they have in Brazil.  This location consisted 48,696 acres with 20,400 acres of soybeans.   They have 320 acres of research with 47 trials and test 167 varieties each year to select about 11 that they will grow each year.

They measure production costs in bags of soybeans  per hectare, which is roughly equivalent to bushels per acre.  They estimate a fixed and variable cost of 37 bags per hectare.  We observed them harvesting with 6 combines in one seed field that averaged about 58 bags per hectare.   They use combines for about 7000 hours before trading them in.  They have a close relationship with John Deere.  We observed technicians estimating populations, harvest loss and diseases while they were combining.

Key production issues they face include white mold, soybean rust, stinkbugs, caterpillars like Helicoverpa armigera.  They make 6-7 applications of insecticides and fungicides.  They are using an increasing amount of biologicals like Trichoderma harzianum  for white mold management.  They are also using Fluazinam to help control white mold.  We also learned that they have a 90 day sanitary  period when they are not allowed to plant soybeans to help prevent soybean rust development.

At the second stop we visited a farm where yields had stagnated and they have initiated some advanced soil management techniques to improve soil quality and improve soybean yields. In some of their irrigated center pivots, they changed from a traditional soybean/corn rotation to corn interseeded with brachyaria to establish a grass for four months to two years prior to planting soybeans again. 

We observed one field of 700 head of cattle being backgrounded on the grass.  This results in improved soil health and fewer soil borne diseases.  Nematodes and herbicide resistant weeds are also a pest in the area that are helped with this practice.

They are starting to diversify with grapes and persimmons grown next to the soybeans.  They dont have the RR Extend soybeans in Brazil however they do have a Bt soybean called Intacta.

Day 1 Embrapa

Today the group traveled to Embrapa Cerrados which is publicly funded research institute similar to the USDA ARS.  Check out the video presentations in the photo album.  Some key points that we learned were that the tropical soils here are naturally low in pH(4.3) and need constant attention to maintain and they utilize gypsum to move the aluminum which is toxic to roots deeper into the soil profile. Wei also learned about the integrated crop livestock research that is increasing the carrying capacity of pastures, allowing more land to be converted to crop production.

We also visited with Embrapa soybean breeding and learned that disease and  nematode resistance are key issues here.  They have a public/private breeding partnerships that allow them to develop soybean varieties adapted to this area of Brazil.  We saw evidence of soybean rust on some lines but they have developed some resistant lines.

Visited a crop/livestock forest integrated systems research trial.  They start with soybeans planted with wide (22m) rows of Eucalyptus trees.  Then they grow a crop of sorghum between the trees and then follow with a crop of a warm season forage grass called Brachiaria.  Cattle then graze the forage grass as the trees grow.  The 9 year old trees were about 80 feet tall- eventually they can be harvested for pulpwood or lumber.

On the way back to the hotel we visited the Brazilian White House area and took a few pictures of the architecture.

We finished our day with a dinner with Nicolas Rubio, our USDA FAS representative in  Brasilia and he gave us an update on US/Brazil relations.

Enroute to Brasilia

Team Pa on last leg to Brasilia! Great conversation.