Until the mid-20th century, the only crops that could be grown in Brazil en masse were plantation crops, first and most famously sugar, but in time coffee, citrus, bananas and tobacco. But unlike more traditional cereal crops that only require a few weeks of attention per year, such tropical crops are far more labor intensive in their planting, tending, harvesting and transport. Tobacco had to be cut and dried; sugar had to be cut, cooked and refined. Whereas a grain field can be quickly harvested and dumped into a truck, harvesting and transporting bananas, for example, takes much longer. These characteristics impacted Brazil in two critical ways. First, the capital required for these plantations was so great that smallholders of the American model were largely shut out. Instead, plantations meant company towns where economic oligarchies gave birth to political oligarchies. Even in modern times, Brazil's geography continues to favor oligarchic plantation farming to family farming. At present, 85 percent of farms in the United States — a country with a reputation for factory farming — are 500 acres or fewer, whereas 70 percent of Brazilian farms are 500 acres or more. Time has not moderated this trend, but rather deepened it. In the latter half of the 20th century, Brazil launched a massive agricultural diversification effort that included the clearing of vast swaths of land in the interior, some of it in the cerrado and some as far inland as the Bolivian border. Among other agricultural products, some of these new lands were appropriate for corn and soybeans, crops normally quite amenable to farmers of a more modest capital base. But the cerrado requires massive inputs before agriculture can be attempted, and the interior lands are often in excess of 1,000 kilometers from Brazil's perennially overworked ports. The twin development and infrastructure costs wound up reinforcing the oligarchic nature of the Brazilian agricultural system to the point that the average "new" Brazilian farm is six times the size of the farms of "old" Brazil.
