Itamarati Farm, one of Brazil's largest single soyabean plantations in Mato Grosso state, has planted 63 percent of its estimated crop due to favourable rains, a technician said. "It's been raining hard about every three to four days and then clearing, which has just been great for planting," a technician on the farm said from his tractor while taking a short break from planting one of the farm's fields.
"We've planted about 30,000 hectares, which is better than last year at this time.
The weather has helped," he said, adding that about 47,000 hectares of the farm's roughly 53,000 hectares of productive land will be planted to soya this year.
The farm also produces corn and cotton, the planting of which are also underway.
A spokesman from the Andre Maggi Group, the world's single largest soyabean producer, was not available for comment. Maggi Group has been operating Itamarati with an option to buy it.
The group harvested around 370,000 tonnes of soyabeans last season but traded nearly seven times that amount.
Its soya is shipped abroad through the southern ports of Santos and Paranagua as well as the Amazon port of Itacoatiara.
The farm was founded by the one-time Soy King Olacyr de Moraes on the high plateau on the eastern slope of the Chapada dos Parecis Reserve in western Mato Grosso, Brazil's largest soyabean producing state.
Mato Grosso in the center-west soya belt is traditionally the first state to plant soyabeans each season in Brazil.
Plants on many fields surrounding the farm were a healthy, deep spinach-green, with two to five leaf nodes and standing between two and six inches high.
The region has been dry for the last four to five days, but more showers are expected later this week in the area.
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