Porto Alegre and Home

On the last day of our trip we got a quick breakfast and left the town of Passo Fundo to head to the airport in Porto Alegre.  This was about a four hour drive through a rolling area of small farms and forests.  We saw a bit more corn and pasture land on this trip than on our previous ventures.  We noticed some roadside vendors selling beef hides and also a large yard of what looked like Eucalyptus logs.  Eucalyptus is used for a number of things that include burning to dry grain.  Most of the trip was on a two lane winding road and many of the grain trucks from the Passo Fundo area must need to make the same 180 mile trip to the export terminals at Porto Alegre.  Porto Alegre is a city of about 1.4 million located at the junction of five rivers and is also a large port city where soybeans are also exported.

Early in the afternoon, we caught our flight from Porto Alegre to Rio De Janiero and said goodbye to our guide Marcelo Arruda and thanked him and Explorations by Thor for a wonderful experience .

In Rio we had a six hour layover and then an overnight 8 hour flight to Miami.  After a short layover in Miami, we boarded a plane to Baltimore and our group said goodbye to each other there after about 33 hours of traveling.  It was a great trip and we all learned alot about Brazilian soybean production and culture along the way.  Each of us brought back some tidbits that will be useful in our work with soybeans in the future and we all plan to share our experiences with others.

Day 8 Passo Fundo, Cotrijal, and Embrapa Wheat

This was our final day of touring.  We left Passo Fundo early to head an hour or so west to visit with the leadership of a large cooperative called Cotrijal with more than 6000 members and over 460 million in revenues. They were in the process of organizing a large Ag Progress Days type event called Expodirecto Cotrial which attracts more than 200,000 people each year with around $600 million in deals each year.  We met with the Coop leaderships and discussed of the challenges and opportunities the cooperative provides. This was organized more as an independent cooperative like the old Agway stores in PA and they even operated some grocery and hardware stores.  They were advocates new technology and innovation and have staff agronomists that work with members to fine tune management.  Key profit centers were soy, wheat, barley, canola, dairy and pork production.  Soybean yields of coop members are significantly higher than the state average.  After the discussion with the leadership we visited the exposition site and some of the soybean trial plots that were established to showcase insect management. 

We returned to Passo Fundo for lunch and then headed to the EMBRAPA Wheat station for a visit of several field trials and then joined them an indoor session on some research updates.  In the outdoor trials we first saw a demonstration of a planter equipped with an in row subsoiling knife.  Also we reviewed a forage trial and found that 11 cuts of alfalfa are possible in this region producing 12 tons of forage annually. In a third trial we reviewed a crop rotation study that showed when wheat is grown as a winter crop within three years of each other, diseases can have a significant impact on yield.  Wheat is not grown on every farm in the winter and there seems to be more potential to use the winter for crop or cover crop production in the region that is currently being done. 

After several more presentations indoors we had a wrap up session among tour members to review what we had learned on our trip.They had an interesting display of crop root sysems in plexiglas that we viewed. We shared our thoughts on sustainability issues we encountered in Brazilian soybean production, the economics of soybean production, and some of the key take home messages we would be bringing back.

We finished the day with a BBQ at a facility near EMBRAPA Wheat where we thanked our guests for the great visit and hospitality. There was a lot of great one on one engagement here between groups.

Day 7 Falcao and GDM Seeds

We left our hotel in Guarapuava in the Parana state early in morning and traveled for six hours through Santa Catarina to visit a farm near Passo Fundo in the state of Rio Grande du Sul.  We took a quick lunch at a mall along the way that had Subway, McDonalds and Burger King.  A couple of us managed to get an order at Burger King without an interpreter.  Generally the land was rolling in this region with almost everything planted to soybeans.  There was only an occassional corn field.  The farm was the operation of Sementes Falaco, a soybean farm that has done a lot of soil management work.  Fernanda Falcao and her father Mr. Falcao made a presentation describing their efforts to improve soil quality.  They have implemented a combination of carefully designed terraces, no tillage and cover cropping to build soil organic matter and reduce erosion.  They have documented reduced nutrient losses and the ability to save water on the farm.  They have seen consistent improvements in soil test levels and soil carbon accumulations.  Because of the nutrient savings they were able to suspend fertilizer applications for five years following a drought and this had a significant economic impact.

Following this field visit we had made arrangements to visit with representatives from GDM.  GDM is a soybean seed/gentics company that has grown rapidly in South America and is beginning to develop markets in the US.  Rain early in the day made the field road impassible however, so we decided to change plans and meet at a local Pizza shop in Passa Fundo.  The GDM reps were guests of Shaun Heinbaugh, one of our tour participants, who had made contact with GDM representatives in the US prior to the trip.  The reps shared with us some of their breeding objectives and marketing plans for soybean seeds.  They market seeds under two brands, GDM and Donmario.  We learned that in Brazil, soybean genetics must have the same name regardless of who sells them.  In the US, companies can each have a different name on the same genetics.