Brazil is not a country, It is a continent: What that actually means for Agri-Tech #3
World Cup Series - Brazil #3
By Mark Jarman with inputs from Vinícius Guimarães, Vitor Mondo and Janaina Tanure.
Ronaldo. R9, not R7. The best Brazilian footballer of my generation, and probably still underappreciated for what he actually was. Pure instinct, movement that made defenders look like they were standing still.
Then there was Juninho arriving at Middlesbrough in 1996. A Brazilian in the north east of England, dribbling past opposition players who had no idea what was coming. A lot of people in this country genuinely woke up to Brazilian football because of him.
Five World Cups. The most successful footballing nation in history. And yet no title since 2002. More than twenty years of a squad that on paper should be winning tournaments and somehow isn’t quite. Brazilian agriculture carries that same feeling. The talent isn’t in question. The scale isn’t in question. The question is whether everything around it is finally aligned to deliver what it has always been capable of.
One of the more reliable ways to tell whether someone actually knows Latin America is to ask them about Brazil. The people who know it well pause before answering. The people who don’t, usually start talking about São Paulo straight away, often about a conference they attended or a tech hub they visited for three days.
São Paulo is remarkable. It is also not Brazil, in the same way London is not England, except the distance between São Paulo and the reality of Brazilian agriculture is considerably greater than any motorway journey from Heathrow. Every time I think I am starting to understand this country, it shows me a version of itself I had not seen before.
Real Brazil, not São Paulo Brazil
The moment I think about most when I think about Brazil is not a conference room. It is a farm in remote Minas Gerais, where my friend Vinicius from Embrapa took me to meet a friend of his who was building something from the ground up on a small cachaca operation.
We wrangled chickens. We picked oranges off the tree. I drove my first tractor. That evening the local town held a festival, and we went along to help sell homemade products at a stall. I was the only foreigner there, and the warmth of it has stayed with me ever since. It is a version of Brazil that does not make it into the investment reports.
Then in December 2023, my good friend Janaina at Embrapa organised a visit to a sugarcane mill in São Paulo state. I have been to sugar beet facilities in the UK and assumed I had a reasonable sense of what an industrial processing operation looks like.
I did not. The volume of cane being processed, the logistics systems tracking every stage of production, the sheer sound of it, all at a scale that dwarfed anything I had seen before. You cannot understand Brazilian agriculture until you have stood inside it.
That is the thing the trade reports tend to miss. Brazil is not one market. Our research identified four distinct productive ecosystems: the Sul in the south, the Sudeste including coffee-rich Minas Gerais and São Paulo’s sugarcane belt, the vast Centro Oeste known as the Cerrado, and the expanding MATOPIBA frontier in the north east. The Cerrado alone covers roughly the same agricultural area as the whole of Argentina. There is no single Brazil agtech strategy. There are at least four.
The unfashionable opportunity
Everyone talks about the shiny end of Brazilian agtech: the startups, the corridors, the investment figures. That is not where the real opportunity sits, or at least not all of it.
Brazil has vast areas of degraded land. Pasture that has been overgrazed. Soil farmed hard without being looked after. Restoring it through regenerative practices is unglamorous work. It will never make a flashy conference slide. But the scale of what is possible, if it is done properly, is extraordinary.
This is the Thiago from Brentford version of Brazilian agriculture. Not the headline act, but the one quietly doing the work that decides whether the whole thing actually functions. It takes patience and technical knowledge, and a willingness to work on something that will never trend on LinkedIn. That is exactly why, done well, the returns are so significant.
What Embrapa actually did, and is doing next
Most international commentators describe Embrapa as Brazil’s agricultural research body. Accurate, but it undersells the institution considerably.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Cerrado was considered unproductive. The soil was too acidic, the rainfall too seasonal, the logistics too difficult. Embrapa mapped it, developed varieties suited to it, and worked with the national development bank BNDES to finance the farmers willing to try it. Over roughly two decades, Brazil went from net food importer to the world’s largest agricultural net exporter. Fifty years of applied research. Over 40 specialised units. Thousands of researchers.
It is not a story confined to the past, or to Brazilian soil. Through international cooperation programmes such as Labex in Europe and the US, and technology transfer partnerships across Africa and Asia, Embrapa is shaping the future of tropical agriculture well beyond its own borders. Amazon bioeconomy crops like açai. Tropical livestock genomics. Gene-edited soybeans. The work that transformed the Cerrado was not glamorous at the time either. It rarely is.
Janaina Tanure leads Innovation and Technology Transfer at Embrapa Environment, and she is the reason I got to see Embrapa properly, not as a visitor on a tour but as someone sitting in the rooms where the real conversations happen. As she would describe herself, she is not a typical Embrapa profile: driven, internationally connected, focused on getting research out of the journal and into the field. She also organised that sugarcane visit. The person who changes how you see a market is rarely the one handing out brochures at a trade stand.
The honest truth about market entry
I have had versions of the same conversation many times, with companies from the UK, Europe, North America. They enter Brazil, set up a team, put people in country. Six to twelve months later they are starting again, this time hiring a Brazilian country manager who actually understands how the market works.
The relationship they thought they were building existed at one level of the organisation. The decision-making sat somewhere else entirely.
Brazil’s football team is currently navigating a genuine debate about whether the manager should always be Brazilian, or whether an outsider can bring something the system could not generate from within itself. Ancelotti might be exactly what unlocks a sixth World Cup precisely because he is not homegrown. The best market entry stories I have seen follow the same logic. Local roots and relationships, plus external capability and credibility. Neither alone is enough.
Where this is all heading
I am writing this from Acre and Rondônia, two states on the western Amazon frontier that most people working in Brazilian agtech have never visited. I am here for our regenerative soy and deforestation work, funded by JFF, meeting soy farmers and running workshops.
These are states where the tension between the old Brazil and the new one is impossible to miss. Tradition and business, environment and progress, sitting right next to each other. The degraded land question is not abstract here. It is the actual work.
That tension is one Brazilian football has always carried too. The jogo bonito alongside the demands of a modern tournament where system and structure win trophies. Five World Cups, and twenty-plus years without a sixth. The talent was never the problem. It was always the system around it.
Juninho at Middlesbrough was a glimpse of something most people were not ready to take seriously yet. The sugarcane mill in São Paulo state in December 2023 was the same feeling. You have to see it to understand it. I would recommend finding a way to.
Thinking about Brazil as part of your international agtech strategy? Embrapa is a good place to start understanding what Brazil looks like from the inside. Happy to connect and talk through what we’ve learned. Find me at mark.jarman@agritierra.com
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