After 40 years of research, Brazilian scientists and agronomists have managed to develop wheat varieties that can be grown in hot and dry areas, typical of tropical climates. Production has already begun in the cerrado, in states such as Goiás and Minas Gerais, with good results. The expectation is to make Brazil self-sufficient in wheat production, the only agricultural commodity that the country needs to import.
The country has even bigger ambitions. In ten years, if all goes well, Brazil may dispute a place among the world's largest exporters of the cereal, alongside the European Union (responsible for about 17% of global shipments), Russia (16.4%) and Australia (13.7%).
Today, the Midwest, where tropical wheat is being cultivated, is responsible for 10% of the national production of the cereal (the rest comes from the South). The country already has a productivity champion. It is the rural producer Paulo Bonato, from Cristalina, in Goiás, who harvested 9.63 tons of wheat per hectare, three times more than the national average, last year.
"The genetic potential of the seeds that we plant in the cerrado can reach productivity of up to 10 tons per hectare," says Celso Moretti, president of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), in an exclusive interview with Czapp.
they are growing wheat in the savannah holy shit
Mind immediately went to Brazil's diplomacy to disseminate savannah soy and China's to disseminate their miracle rice across subsaharan Africa. This has so much liberation potential and also makes me slightly less nervous about the inevitable destruction of Brazil by Climate Change.
Watch our for the heart attack gun, Brazilian researchers and Lula!
Tropical areas are not hot and dry. They are hot and wet. That's the issue right.
not all of them. consider that much of south america's agricultural output comes from a region on the same latitude as the namibian desert and that the interior is under 'siege' from the west by the andes and on the east by the brazilian escarpment. so brazil for a long time had to rely on its southern portions (pampas, like argentina just with worse riverways), the hot and humid coastal areas, as well as the more temperate zones atop mountains. the country only became a net food exporter on the backs of massive junta era projects to lower the acidity of the midwestern soil, plus the development of staple crops which can survive in it. and that is because we exported soy, corn and beef. we still had to import wheat from argentina, but this may no longer be the case.
look at this map . the green is the amazon - poor soil for agriculture actually - the red is savannah, and the blue is different levels of desertification. the red is where we can grow wheat now. now superimpose brazil on the US and you have an idea of the scale of new resources we are talking about.
Is this a hard, or a soft wheat? Is it a winter, or a spring variety? Is the gluten content high enough to be suitable for bread making? Is this a genetically modified strain, or has it been produced through selective breeding? Is it related to the HB4 GMO wheat recently approved in Brazil?
hard wheat for breadmaking, according to the article. i shall google on the GMO HB4 thing but i read some comments saying no. i believe the planting season is in our autumn/winter, right after soy's season on spring.
Thank you! Up here in the USA, our hard red winter wheat crop was extremely bad last year, despite good overall wheat yields. Hard red wheat production has also been declining here for a couple decades for reasons related to climate change. It is very prudent to be expanding production of this type of wheat in Brazil at this time. I will be following this story as it progresses. Let’s hope this wheat lives up to the hype.
Oh yeah, things aren't much better down here either. I mentioned in another post that Brazil became a net exporter of food on the back on soy and beef basically, due to developing a variant of soy that does well in the savannah. But the keyword was net. We still relied on Argentina for wheat and our vegetables mostly came from limited areas on the coast up mountains where the climate is a bit more forgiving. Argentina, unfortunately, is suffering from droughts and climate change as well. So this development bodes well in so many ways, it legitimately made me :bloomer: for a few hours
