Leave well alone

IN 1984 WALTER HORITA, the youngest of three sons of a Japanese immigrant who farmed 500 hectares (1,240 acres) in the southern state of Paraná, headed north in search of land. Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso, colonised by gaúchos from southern states in the previous two decades, were too expensive for him. Eventually he settled on western Bahia (see map below), where he bought 1,210 hectares, paying four sacks of soyabeans per hectare. “There was nothing,” he says. “No roads, no schools, no health care, no electricity, no water supply, no phone.” He got digging. By 1999 the farm was so successful that his brothers in Paraná sold up and joined him. Today the Horita brothers own 150,000 hectares in western Bahia, growing mostly soya, cotton and corn.

The story of how Brazil’s vast central and north-eastern crop belt was won starts in 1973, when Brazil’s military regime decided to centralise agronomy research and set up the Brazilian agricultural research corporation, Embrapa. It sent 1,200 bright young scientists abroad to study. When they returned and were set to work, they achieved something of a miracle: they made the cerrado bloom. Until then, Brazil’s savannah with its acid, nutrient-poor soil had been thought impossible to cultivate. It turned out that deep tilling, huge quantities of lime and fertiliser and fast-growing crops bred to suit the local conditions could coax a rich harvest from it.