A Day of Dairy, Corn, and Soybeans

Today was a spectacular day of exploring agriculture in Brazil. We started off our day visiting the Piracanjuba dairy training center. Piracanjuba is a dairy company that produces and sells milk, cheese, and other dairy products. This center provides training for employees of dairy farms selling milk to Piracanjuba and also sends advisors out to farms to improve production. Students enjoyed comparing production practices in the USA to Brazil. One of the surprising challenges that Brazil is working to address is their high somatic cell count.

After lunch we visited a soybean and corn farm. The most common production practice is soybeans as a first crop followed by corn as a second crop. With irrigation they are starting to produce tomatoes, sweet corn, or edible beans as a third crop. This year they are going to follow the second crop with an African grass grazed with beef cattle in half of their fields. The grass helps reduce compaction in the fields. We were able to see harvest (soybeans) and planting (corn) within the same field in the same day. To end our time at the farm we visited second season corn crop that was 120 day maturity that was 7-8 feet tall after just 52 days of production.  It was an eye opening experience for all once again comparing production between our two countries.

We ended the evening at the hot springs pool at our hotel in Caldas Novas. We enjoyed an evening of conversation and reflection on the day at the pool and enjoyed dinner poolside. Unfortunately, our WiFi has not worked the best which is the reason for this late post.