Yesterday, for the third time in four years, we hosted a group of Brazilian farmers that are visiting the U.S. The group was sponsored by Syngenta. They were very interested in learning about what technologies and agronomic practices we are using for corn and soybean production here in the Midwest. It was hard for us to imagine some of the struggles they have to deal with to farm there. Land and labor is cheaper, but government and financial issues are their biggest hurdles (18.5% interest for operating money). The growers that visited were from the southern part of Brazil where farms are smaller in size than what we mostly read about. We polled the growers and came up with an average size between 2000-3000 acres. They were impressed that our farm, being about that size, operated with so much less labor than they were used to.
As far as the crop goes, we haven’t made it back to the field yet. We had a frost on Saturday morning but so far it looks like the corn is going to come out of it ok, we should know for sure by tomorrow. The beans are our biggest concern with the frost but it seems they were just poking through the ground and look to be doing ok.
