Forage seed business in Brazil

The forage seed demand come mainly from grass. Recently there was a big increase due to the fact that Brazil has more than 200 million cattle and it became a very important meat exporter country.  Today it represents 17% of the world market.

The second reason is that beef and milk cattle farmers are using more technology in order to get more kilograms of meat or liters of milk per hectare.

The biggest part of beef cattle in Brazil is raised in natural pastures at open fields. Statistics indicate that Brazil has approximately 60 million hectares of natural pasture and 120 million hectares of cultivated pastures from which 8 million hectares are renewed every single year. The 180 million hectares of pasture are 3 times more than the area used for grain production in the country (50 million hectares).

Forage seed production in Brazil reached about 120,000 tons in 2007, decreasing to 60,000 tons in 2008 due to climatic conditions. We can estimate the most recent demand for forage seed is more than 90,000 tons and it has a value of more than USD 400 million. Only Brazil exports approximately 60,000 tons of forage seeds every year that represents about USD 60 million.

Forage seeds represent 18% of the whole Brazilian seed market and it has called foreign companies attention the past couple of years.