Sprinkler heads dangle from a suspended pipeline that stretches for several hundred metres, producing a fine mist that falls on row after row of green shoots. The irrigation system slowly turns on wheels around one of 36 perfect circles where, depending on the season, grow soy, cotton, beans, millet, sorghum or wheat.
With its scale and mechanisation, the enormous farm in Brazil is a paragon of modern crop production. All in the heart of South America’s largest tropical savannah, which was largely empty for much of the country’s history.
“Brazilian agriculture has completely changed in the past 20 years,” says Celestino Zanella, whose family founded the Grupo Decisão estate in the west of Bahia state in 2003. “When all this was overgrown, I said: ‘I have an opportunity’.”