Western Producer reporter Ed White visited Brazil to explore agricultural development and opportunities for Canadians brought about by Brazil’s rise to prominence as an agricultural powerhouse.
CASCAVEL, Brazil – Soybean acreages are exploding and corn production is rocketing upward, but Brazilian wheat production is sagging and stumbling.
Even here in southern Brazil, which is colder than the northern regions that produce so much soybean and corn, wheat is a poor and ugly cousin, hanging out with the sexy crops but being ignored all the time.
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That’s frustrating for Brazilian wheat developers, who think a good crop is being wasted.
“We know wheat is very important for the country,” said Ivo Marcos Carraro, the executive director of COODETEC, the Cooperativa Central Agropecuaria de Desenvolvimento Technologico e Economico Ltda.
“We know we can make and export wheat.”
COODETEC is a research centre for a federation of Brazilian farmer co-operatives. When it was founded in 1974, it focused on wheat and soybean development, and has since added corn and cotton.
But farmers are growing less wheat and other prairie-type cereals, even though it fits with soybean growing.
Brazilian farmers can grow two crops a year: one in the summer and one in the winter. Their seasons occur at the opposite time as Canada’s because the country lies in the southern hemisphere.
Most farmers will plant soybeans for their summer crop, because they thrive in the hot and wet conditions common here between September and March. To break the diseases that can plague the next summer’s soybean crop, farmers used to commonly grow wheat or “black oats” in the June-July-August winter that can see frost on some nights.
But in recent years farmers have begun switching to corn as a post-soybean rotation crop, attracted by the large local livestock feeding industry. Parana state contains many hog barns, chicken barns and even some cattle feeding operations.
Carraro said wheat and black oats work better than corn at breaking the soybean disease cycle, but farmers have been attracted by the local feed market for corn and by the Brazilian government’s active disinterest in the crops.
“The government thinks buying wheat is good for trade,” said Carraro.
Brazil consumes two million tonnes of wheat per year, but only produces one million tonnes. The bulk of the imports come from its neighbour Argentina.
“The government would rather sell them refrigerators in exchange,” said Carraro.
Wheat production is also stumbling in the more northern and hotter state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which has seen yields for soybeans, corn and cotton soar in recent years when wheat has been volatile and unpromising.
Between 1980 and 2003, corn yield improved from .49 tonnes per acre to 1.65. Soybean yields similarly increased, but wheat has ranged from 0.9 tonnes per acre in 1980 to 1.87 tonnes in 2003, but its average yield, including 2000, has remained under one tonne per acre.
Carraro, whose centre is aggressively developing Roundup Ready varieties, is saddened by the neglect of wheat.
“We have good varieties, good lands to plant wheat, good farmers who know how to produce wheat,” he said. “But the government wants to have us sell something else.”
