Wheat harvested in Brazil’s semiarid for first time ever
São Paulo – Wheat has been harvested in Ceará, a dry state with scant water resources in Northeast Brazil, for the first time in history. The farming project was developed by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in partnership with milling company Santa Lúcia. The first stage took place in a semiarid area, with a fast planting-to-harvest cycle and high yields.
Although the actual planting only started recently, the tropical cultivars (pictured above) that enabled the project started being developed 15 years ago. These varieties do not require much water, so they are well-suited to Ceará as well as the Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa. “We have the genetic material for four varieties of tropical wheat. We picked the two that performed best, which were BRS404 and BR264,” Osvaldo Vieira, head of Embrapa’s wheat division Embrapa Trigo, told ANBA over the phone.
By Thaís Sousa via Brazil-Arab News Agency