Brazil Becomes the New Food Superpower

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

The soil is light on organic material compared with the classic black dirt of the upper Midwest. "The more you farm this soil, the better it gets," says Melby. "For soybeans, it's the Garden of Eden—with fungicide applied." The farmers are eager consumers of new techniques. "We will apply technology in whatever form it comes," says Otaviano Pivetta, one of Brazil's largest growers. "With the world growing in population, there is no other option."

Boom towns. Along Brazil's farm belts, ag towns are getting bigger—and wealthier. In the northeastern state of Bahia, the town of Luís Eduardo Magalhães is growing at a faster clip than any other in Brazil. Set on a high plateau, LEM, as it is known, has grown from a ramshackle settlement to 18,000 people in 2000 to 50,000 now. The city expects to reach 100,000 in as few as five years. Blocks of yet-empty dirt streets are laid out; sewer lines are being dug. "Twenty years ago, this was forest," says the mayor, Oziel Oliveira.

Though a drive through the town's crime-ridden slum serves as a reminder of the dark side of LEM's pioneer days, new prosperity is also on display at the gated Cotton and Soy Residences, where a four-hole golf club, tennis courts, pool, and a clubhouse entertain well-to-do farmers and the profes-sionals who have followed them. The airport houses several single- and twin-engine airplanes belonging to area farmers.

Not far away is the world's largest outdoor cotton storage facility, where blue, orange, and green tarps cover the fiber before shipment. Elsewhere, more than 100 double-trailer trucks—dubbed "Romeo and Juliets"— wait at a soybean- crushing plant of U.S.-based Bunge. But it is a drive along LEM's main road that showcases the breadth of the new ag economy: grain elevators, tractor dealers, truck and tire repair shops, chemical and cement stores, a fertilizer factory, irrigation sellers, welders and well drillers, freight companies and law offices, gas stations and a coffee warehouse, a cotton gin and a fiber-testing lab, cafes and a farmers' meeting hall. They are serving, says Brian Willott, a Missourian who farms south of LEM, "one of the honey spots of world agriculture."

Back in Lucas, as well, the frontier phase has yielded to rapid-fire town building. A grid of still-unpaved streets awaits the more than doubling of Lucas's population expected in the next three years. Two-room starter houses are under construction. "Everybody's coming here because there are jobs," says Carlos Caneiro, a minimart owner who read about Lucas on the Web.

On Lucas's western outskirts, an agro-industrial complex of uncommon scale is taking shape. A crushing plant will process soybeans from the surrounding countryside. Much of the resulting soy oil will be piped to a biodiesel plant in the complex. A large share of the remaining solids—the soy meal—will be transferred a few hundred yards to what will be the world's largest inland feed mill. That feed will provide chow for the area's soaring populations of hogs and poultry. For many, their days on Earth will end at two new slaughterhouses, which will be able to process half a million chickens and 5,000 pigs daily.

Now home to 31,000 people, Lucas is just 17 years old. Many of the area's producers came from southern Brazil, the children of Italian and German immigrants. They came west for profit and to "look for adventure," as Marino Franz, Lucas's mayor and co-owner of Mano Julio Farm, puts it. The adventure phase, he reports, "is done." That seems evident at a Sunday afternoon church fundraiser, where hundreds of pounds of churrasco grass-fed beef are being fire-roasted and a band is pounding out turbocharged Brazilian polka to a family crowd. Throttle back on the music and re-label the bottles of beer, and you might think yourself in a farming burg in the American Midwest.