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.