Brazil fertile with promise for U.S. farmers

BAHIA, Brazil - It’s November 2007 and Tyler Bruch, the 28-year-old son of a farmer, is planting corn — the first seed of his planting season.

Bruch is an Iowa boy, born and bred — a true Midwesterner right down to the John Deere planter that seeds his fields. But this isn't Iowa corn, and Tyler Bruch isn't on American soil.

His farm is 6,000 miles from home — in Brazil.

"We've got 130 hectares here, roughly 280 acres of corn here," he said. "We've got corn going in up on the other farms, and then we'll jump in on soybeans."

"Nothing existed here," he said on a recent tour of his farm. "I came out here one day and said, well, this looks like a good place to put basically a building site, a place to have an establishment at, so marked some flags down and that was it."

Bruch's parents started farming in northwest Iowa in the mid-1970s. But the lure of cheap land and cheap labor drew him here in 2003, when he was fresh out of Iowa State University. At that time, you could buy land for $300 an acre that today costs upward of $2,000 an acre.

"It's been a pretty good ride so far," he said.

The ride has been pretty good not just for Bruch but for hundreds of American farmers for whom Brazil has become a field of dreams.

"We get between 60 and 80 inches of rainfall a year," he said. "And it's like this every day — you know, mid '80s, 12, 13 hours of sunlight. We grow some fantastic yields."

Video   Bumper crop May 12: With record commodity prices, this year is turning into a good one for corn and soybean farmers, helping to create a ripe environment for expanding in Brazil. CNBC

A great place to grow crops — and a business. Bruch, who started with 2,500 acres, now farms 52,000. His farm in Brazil is 20 times larger than the one he left in Iowa. During the height of the growing season it's hard to tell which farm — or which continent — you're flying over.

"We can't expand anymore in the U.S.," he said. "There's probably a few places in the world where you can actually go into and expand. Brazil's one of them."

Larger than the continental United States, Brazil has a climate conducive to growing high-yield crops year round. The southern regions lead the world in coffee, sugar cane and orange juice production. But much of central Brazil — an area as large as Alaska — is dry land known as Cerrado.

Less than 10 years ago, this land was considered useless. The Cerrado was nothing more than scrub brush, and hardly fertile. Today, the region grows some of the world's most precious commodities and has made Brazil a farming superpower, according to Robert Thompson, an agricultural economist who worked with the USDA and the World Bank.

"Brazil has emerged as the world's bread basket," he said.

Thompson did his doctorate work in Brazil in the 1970s. Back then, he saw no future for the Cerrado.

"Driving out through there, you just couldn't imagine it being made productive," he said.

The Brazilian government created the Brazilian Enterprise for Research on Farming and Cattle Raising, known here by its Portuguese acronym Embrapa, a corporation dedicated to developing new farming frontiers.

Researchers studied the Cerrado's overly acidic ground, which is more sand than soil, and found a nutrient mix that turned a wasteland into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world and helped transform Brazil into the ninth-largest economy overall. Today, it's the world's largest exporter of soybeans and products derived from the crop.

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