Soy Rally Sends South American Growers Into Pastures

Leonildo Bares, a soybean grower near the Amazon farming frontier town of Sinop, said he’s so confident prices for the commodity will stay near record highs that he’ll extend his crop to neighbors’ boggy cattle pastures.

Confined by Brazil’s crackdown on logging in the Amazon, the farmer talked his neighbors into growing soybeans on their cleared land and sharing the profit. Bares, whose 420-hectare (1,038-acre) farm in the center-western state of Mato Grosso extends on what was untouched rainforest in the 1970s, plans to boost planting to 650 hectares. About 1 million hectares of the state’s pastures, an area the size of Jamaica, probably will be converted to soybean crops in coming years, he predicts.

“The pastures of Mato Grosso can be turned into soybean plantations and probably will,” Bares, who’s also the president of Sinop’s farmers association, said in a telephone interview from the city. “Anyone with the knowledge and money who’s willing to come here and do it, can do it.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-13/soy-rally-sends-south-american-growers-into-pastures.html