Agriculture Diversification in Brazil

We had an awesome day of learning on Monday! We jumped right in with a visit to Embrapa. Embrapa is a governmental research agency that is all across Brazil. This specific location specializes in rice and edible beans, but is becoming more diversified in it’s research with cotton, maize, soybean, beef cattle, and dairy cattle. We started our day with an overview of Embrapa before moving to their gene bank, which stores around 47,000 different varieties of rice and beans. We enjoyed visiting their greenhouses where they were raising rice and beans for the bank as well as a visit to a cotton research area. As we finished our morning at Embrapa we traveled with them to their nearby feedlot to learn about beef cattle production. Nellore is the breed of cattle that are popular in Brazil as they are breed to tolerate the heat.

For lunch we made our way to the UFG campus where classes will be starting Tuesday. Following lunch we toured the agriculture campus and made a stop in to the coffee lab where we learned more about roasting coffee beans and sampled some fresh product. Any visit to UFG is not complete until you find the monkeys roaming central campus and today certainly did not disappoint.

Late afternoon we traveled to Fazenda Organica Novas Senhora Aparecida. This is an organic farm that produces a variety of crops including: corn, soybeans, peanuts, bananas, papayas, coffee, etc. The farmer is very innovative in his production techniques and puts an emphasis on education opening his farm to other producers and university students. Along with his crop production he also has a wildlife rehabilitation center that works with all animals except pumas and snakes. We were able to visit some of the blue macaws he was working with.

We rounded out the day with a great steak dinner and enjoying the weather poolside before preparing to head onto Caldas Novas tomorrow. There is no doubt there is major diversification of agriculture in Brazil and we will continue our exploration with a visit to a dairy and a corn/soybean farm on Tuesday!