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
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.