Brazil Becomes the New Food Superpower

A soybean harvest. Brazil has become the world's No. 1 soybean exporter.

All that would matter little, though, had Brazilian scientists not figured out how to modify soil and seeds to prosper on the humid, sun-baked cerrado. The Brazilians at EMBRAPA—many trained in part at American agronomy schools—discovered that heavy applications of lime and phosphate-rich fertilizers could reformulate the cerrado's acidic soils. "Brazil had been un-important in the export of food to the world market," says Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winner honored as the author of the 1960s-era "Green Revolution," which tamed hunger in places like India and Mexico. "It was followed up with a lot of good policy"—a combination, he says, that "changed Brazil's whole potential." Borlaug rates the cerrado's development as "one of the great achievements of agricultural science in the 20th century."

What is unfolding on the plains at the center of South America probably qualifies as the most important transformation of land since the breaking of sod in the Midwest during America's westward expansion. With comparatively little unused, arable land left in the world's temperate zones, including in the United States, no other country on Earth has Brazil's surge capacity in food production. "The real story of Brazil is how much more they can grow," says Clifford Sobel, the U.S. ambassador in Brasília.

Here, the guiding instinct is to achieve economies of scale. While Midwestern spreads commonly span 1,500 to 2,000 acres, modern farms in west-central Brazil typically run more than 20,000 acres. GPS-guided autosteering tractors roll precisely through the fields for miles without need of a turn. Life gets easy for the harvester's driver: Turn on the autopilot, set an alarm clock, and take a nap. Even ag veterans get excited at the scale. "I was amazed at the vastness of these operations," marvels Mark Keenum, a U.S. under secretary of agriculture who toured Brazilian farms in May.

One hour northwest of Lucas do Rio Verde, they are thinking big at the 24,000-acre Mano Julio Farm. The soy has been harvested, and the follow-on crops of corn and cotton are maturing nicely. The farm employs more than 200 workers who live in dormitories there or in Lucas. A basic farmhand makes about $530 a month, plus housing, food, and transport. The farm is raising 6,000 head of cattle, but the bigger plan is to launch a sow-nursery operation later this summer that should produce 225,000 piglets a year.

The general manager, Ismael Gross, has an M.B.A. in agribusiness and accounting from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Key to the farm's prospects, he says, is being agile. "We move very fast," Gross says. "We cannot expect anything from the government." In fact, local producers banded together, with help from the state government, to pave part of an access road. They also help fund an ag research agency in Lucas that studies local crop conditions.

Brazil has plenty of smaller family farms—more than 4 million in all—that mostly serve the internal market. But the dynamism powering Brazil into the front rank of food producers comes from the big-scale operations. Mechanized and chemical-intensive, this is a far cry from the often romanticized vision of farming portrayed—mostly by nonfarmers—in Europe and parts of the United States. "This is factory farming," allows Kory Melby, a Minnesota farmer who moved to Brazil and consults on Mato Grosso agriculture.

This is also the tropics, with stifling heat and humidity untouched by a freeze. That means an array of pests such as the perennial enemy of soy—Asian rust—needs to be attacked with insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The weather, however, conveys an undeniable advantage over the American Midwest, where one crop a year is harvested. Here, two crops are routine, and three are attainable with irrigation.