The numbers

What farming in Tocantins costs — and what it returns

Ways to structure a farm

On any property, the permitted 65% can be used intensively, while the protected 35% (Reserva Legal) allows extensive cattle — meaning up to 100% of the land works for you. Typical structures:

Full arable farming on 65%, two harvests per year; leave the protected 35% to the state carbon scheme.
Mixed farming — 65% intensive agriculture, extensive cattle on the protected 35%; the state carbon scheme still applies.
Intensive cattle on 65%, extensive cattle on the protected area.
Extensive cattle on 100% of the land, and develop your own carbon credit project across the whole property.
Optionally: obtain a European organic certificate and export to the EU.

Good to know: with the state carbon scheme, the protected land simply enters the state's programme. If instead you develop your own carbon project across suitable, eligible parts of the property — land that must then remain untouched — you carry the investment cost yourself, but you also keep the returns.

The standard crop rotation is soybeans, followed in the second harvest by sorghum, cotton, or maize. An alternative second crop is grass — for pasture or simply as ground cover.

Clearing land

If scrubland is to be cleared for cultivation, the procedure is: mechanical clearing and burning; removal of larger roots and stones; one pass with a heavy 36-inch disc harrow, one with a medium 28-inch, two light passes for levelling; then liming with 8–10 tonnes in two stages (plus, ideally, a tonne of gypsum in year two).

Costs vary with the density of the bush and the condition of the soil, but on average expect around €800 per hectare.

The good news: soybeans can be planted in the very year of clearing, with a yield of approximately 50 sacks/ha — recouping about a third of the clearing cost immediately.

Soybean returns

The local unit is the sack of 60 kg, currently around R$ 120 ≈ €20 at the simplified reference rate of R$ 6 per euro.

Cultivation cost: ~35 sacks per hectare (≈ €700)
Average harvest: 60 sacks; good farms reach 70
Profit: ~25 sacks/ha ≈ €500 per hectare in the main harvest
The second harvest, with more irregular rainfall, returns a further €300–350 per hectare

Soybean crop growing on a farm in Tocantins — Soybeans in Tocantins — the backbone crop, with maize, sorghum, or cotton in the second harvest.

All of this without any government subsidies.

Cattle returns

Beef production is partly specialised into breeding, rearing, and fattening farms; fattening happens in feedlots or on pasture. The unit of measure is the arroba (15 kg). A good steer yields 15 arrobas ≈ 225 kg carcass weight, worth about R$ 4,500 at today's prices — of which roughly 25% is profit (≈ €190 per head).

On the protected 35% (natural pasture): ~1 head/ha → ≈ €190 profit per hectare
On cultivated pasture: up to 3 head/ha → ≈ €400 profit per hectare after the higher costs

In practice, one either buys lean steers and fattens them over a year, or buys weaned calves and raises them for about three years — either way aiming to sell one head per hectare per year.

Dairy farming is not common in Tocantins.

Nelore beef cattle on pasture in Tocantins, Brazil — Nelore beef cattle on pasture — raised on both cultivated and protected land.

Business environment & financing

After Brazil vanquished hyperinflation in the mid-1990s, inflation has run roughly between 4.5% and 6%, spiking to around 10% in 2015–16 and again in 2022. The central bank's key rate (SELIC) has ranged between 2% and 14.75% over that period; today it stands at 14.25%.

For agricultural investment, the local borrowing rate is around 14% — tied to the CDI inter-bank overnight rate. A loan taken in US dollars would run roughly 8–12%.

The one asset that cannot normally be financed is the land itself — unless secured against a liquid guarantee such as a bank guarantee. Once purchased, though, the land becomes collateral for everything else: machinery, cattle, inputs.

International and local commodity traders — including the "big four" ABCD (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, Dreyfus) — offer pre-harvest contracts and finance inputs against them, typically asking 28–32 sacks of soybeans per hectare in return.

Understanding the exchange rate

All euro figures on this site use a simplified reference rate of R$ 6 per euro. The Brazilian real has a general long-term tendency to depreciate against the euro — the chart below shows the last 25 years of the R$/€ rate.

Chart of the Brazilian real to euro exchange rate over the last 25 years — R$/€ exchange rate, 2000–2024 — a long-term depreciation of the real against the euro.

At first glance that looks like a risk for a euro investor. In practice it is largely self-correcting, because the things a farm buys and sells — seeds, fertilizer, beef, soybeans — are priced on world markets, not in local currency.

An example: two months ago a bag of soybeans stood at R$ 120; today it is R$ 110. But over the same period the exchange rate moved from 6.3 to 5.85. Converted to euros, that is €19.04 then versus €18.80 now — in euro terms, the price has barely moved.

In other words, when the real weakens, commodity prices in reais tend to rise to compensate, and your euro-denominated returns stay remarkably stable.

All figures use a simplified exchange rate of R$ 6 per euro.

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