Contemplating the Brazilian dilemma: Abundant grain but inadequate storage

Seed Daily via SPX: Tropical climates that allow for year-round farming would seem to be a tremendous economic advantage, but for corn and soybean farmers in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso it also poses a problem-an abundance of grain followed by about a 10 percent postharvest loss, partially due to a lack of storage.

"There is a 34 percent undercapacity of soybean storage, and the situation is aggravated by the rapidly increasing production of second-crop maize," said University of Illinois agricultural economist Peter Goldsmith. "The worst situation occurs in northern Mato Grosso with a simulation of a full-maize second crop. The potential to succession crop is great and current levels of storage are low. There is clear evidence of a shortage of storage, particularly private and cooperative, as grain production rises in the state," he said.

Goldsmith conducted the research project, which was the first to employ Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map the coordinates of commercial, cooperative and private grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso.

"We created GIS coordinates for every facility, mapped them, and then overlaid how much the production there currently is and how much production there would be if farmers were to produce and store a second corn crop on 100 percent of the bean crop, in order to find the areas that had the most congestion and the least congestion," Goldsmith said.

...Goldsmith said that the information will help determine the best, most convenient locations for additional storage...

A farm in the Mato Grosso, shot by Pedro Biondi/ABr, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Brazil license