EN 
PT_BR 
The history of Brazilian soybeans is directly linked to Santa Rosa, in northwestern Rio Grande do Sul. It was there, in 1966, during the first edition of Fenasoja, that the Santa Rosa cultivar was launched, considered the first genuinely Brazilian variety of commercial importance. From there, the country began building a production chain that today accounts for approximately 61% of the national GDP and has transformed Brazil into the world's largest producer and exporter of soybeans.
In 2026, the cultivar and the fair that helped to promote it will celebrate their 60th anniversary, marking one of the most important chapters in the modernization of Brazilian agriculture.
Photo: Disclosure
The history of soybeans in the region began long before the cultivar was released. In 1914, the American pastor Albert Lehenbauer brought the first seeds to northwestern Rio Grande do Sul, during a period marked by poverty and food insecurity among the settlers descended from European immigrants who had established themselves in the region.
At that time, soybeans were still far from having any commercial value. Cultivation initially emerged as an alternative food source for families and animals raised on small farms, especially pigs.
There were no processing industries, logistics infrastructure, or consolidated market. The grain was used as a staple food and source of animal protein within the rural communities themselves.
Over the decades, cultivation began to gain scale and economic importance. In 1941, Santa Rosa received the first soybean processing industry in Brazil, a milestone considered decisive for the development of the national production chain.
The movement consolidated the region as one of the main pioneering centers of soybean cultivation in the country. Soybeans, which initially served as subsistence food and animal feed, came to occupy a strategic position in the Brazilian agricultural economy and paved the way for the expansion of the crop in other regions of the country, especially in the Midwest.
When we stop depending on foreign seeds.
Until the 1960s, growing soybeans in Brazil meant relying on North American varieties developed for climatic conditions different from those in Brazil. Adaptation was partial and productivity was irregular. It was at the Agronomic Institute of Campinas (IAC) that the story began to change.
In 1952, under the guidance of American breeder Leonard Williams, from the United States Department of Agriculture, and researcher Shiro Miyasaka, a new soybean breeding program was structured at IAC. A year later, in 1953, the two carried out the crossbreeding between the D 49-772 and La 41-1219 lines, both of American origin, giving rise to the genetic material that would become the Santa Rosa cultivar.
The resulting lineage, identified as L-326, was introduced to Rio Grande do Sul by the State Department of Agriculture and underwent testing in an experimental area in Júlio de Castilhos. In 1964/65, multiplication began with only 2 kilograms of seed planted. It was Juarez Guterres, an agricultural technician from the Rio Grande do Sul State Department of Agriculture, who recognized the potential of that material, brought it to the experimental fields of Santa Rosa, and conducted the trials that confirmed what the field had already indicated.
In 1966, the cultivar was officially launched at the 1st Fenasoja, named after the city that had invested in the grain before any other place in Brazil. In 1967, after training in the United States, Romeu Kiihl restructured the IAC soybean breeding program focusing on adaptation to low latitudes, and the first breeders at Embrapa Soja, created in 1975, came directly from that same program.
A cultivar that knew the land it was treading on.
Photo: Press release/Dedev/Cidasc
Santa Rosa was not just a new variety. It was a statement. With a late cycle and a plant height of 91 centimeters, compared to the 65 centimeters of Bragg, the most widely used American cultivar at the time, it combined hardiness with good productivity. Its characteristics made it the most adopted cultivar by smallholder farmers, including in intercropping with corn, a fundamental practice for family farming at the time.
It was widely cultivated throughout Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, and Minas Gerais since the late 1960s. In Rio Grande do Sul, it was the most planted cultivar in the last years of the 1960s and the first years of the 1970s, representing 39.3% of all certified seed produced in the state in 1972/73.
Between 1969 and 2001, 9,381,424 50 kg bags of certified Santa Rosa seed were produced in Rio Grande do Sul. It was among the recommended cultivars until 1993/94. For the Rio Grande do Sul farmers who planted it for the first time, the difference was visible to the naked eye: the crop responded, grew on time, and delivered on its promises. Undoubtedly, Santa Rosa, along with the Amarela Comum, Bragg, IAS 5, BR-4, and BR-16 cultivars, is among the most important soybean cultivars of all time in Rio Grande do Sul.
Mother of all cultivars
Photo: Gilson Abreu
The impact was immediate on agriculture and definitive on science. Santa Rosa became the genetic matrix of Brazilian breeding, parental material for the cultivars that came later. Embrapa, created in 1975, inherited this base and multiplied it: in 25 years of research, it developed 159 cultivars that made soybean planting possible in 13 Brazilian states.
Each generation of varieties has carried the legacy of Santa Rosa in its genetic code: greater productivity, greater resistance, greater adaptability. Today's cultivars combine high productivity, stability, and regional reach that would have been impossible to imagine without the foundation established in 1966.
National scale
Photo: Jonathan Campos/AEN
The Daltrozo family illustrates in motion what the Santa Rosa variety represented on a national scale. In the 1970s, brothers Osvaldo, Wilson, Luiz Carlos, and Darci left Cruz Alta, 141 kilometers from Santa Rosa, taking seeds and determination with them. They were pioneers in soybean production in Primavera do Leste, Mato Grosso, today one of the main producing municipalities in the country.
Just as the Daltrozo family brought the seeds to the Midwest, many farming families traveled hundreds of kilometers back to Santa Rosa to retrieve the seeds they would plant in the following harvest. Santa Rosa was not only the starting point, but also the supplier, the reference point, the link connecting the Cerrado to the cradle of Brazilian soybeans. Five decades later, Lucas Daltrozo, Wilson's grandson, continues to cultivate soybeans on the same land his family pioneered, and carries the weight of that gesture in his memory. "The family followed the legacy of resilience that led to cultivating Santa Rosa in that region, and of other people who opened agricultural frontiers and contributed to Brazil becoming the world's largest soybean producer," emphasizes Lucas, a farmer in Primavera do Leste (MT).
A fair that was born along with the seed.
The current expected productivity is 2,350 kg/ha, with an expected harvest of 1,842,419 tons – Photo: Pacheco Fotografias/Fenasoja
Fenasoja was born in the same year and for the same reason: to give soybeans a formal space where science, market, and producer could meet. It was small, regional, fitting into a single pavilion. Sixty years later, it is one of the largest agribusiness events in the country, with hundreds of exhibitors, an audience from all over Brazil and neighboring countries, launches of genetics, machinery and inputs, and billions of reais in business at each edition.
The trajectory of the fair and that of the cultivar are the same story told in two formats: that of a state that believed in the grain before any other place in the country and that, therefore, became the starting point for everything that would come after. “Rio Grande do Sul was the only state in Brazil that had the courage to plant soybeans when nobody knew what it could become. Santa Rosa is the symbol of that. It was born here, grew here, and it was from here that Brazil learned to cultivate the grain that feeds the world today. Sixty years later, celebrating Santa Rosa at Fenasoja is to recognize that this story did not begin in the Cerrado, it did not begin on large farms, it began in the Northwest of Rio Grande do Sul, in the hands of settlers who planted with hunger and harvested with hope,” exalts Marcos Servat, president of Fenasoja.
According to Embrapa Soja researcher Mônica Zavaglia, Santa Rosa is one of the most important cultivars for the development of soybeans as a national crop. “It was developed by the Agronomic Institute of Campinas from the crossing of two North American varieties, but it was in Rio Grande do Sul that it found its vocation. It was the state of Rio Grande do Sul that helped build the legacy that Brazil carries to this day as the world's largest soybean producer,” she emphasizes.
From 206,000 to 179 million tons
Brazil produced 206,000 tons of soybeans in 1960. For the 2025/26 harvest, Conab projects 179.2 million tons. With the genetic advancements pioneered by Santa Rosa, the average productivity of Brazilian crops jumped from one thousand to four thousand kilograms per hectare. The soybean complex, comprised of grain, meal, and oil, accounts for approximately 61% of Brazil's GDP and is the main export product of the national agribusiness.
Santa Rosa, the city that recorded the first commercial cultivation in 1914, which received the country's first processing industry in 1941, which gave its name to the first genuinely Brazilian cultivar in 1966, and which has hosted Fenasoja for six decades, is the starting point of this entire story. The soybeans that began as pig feed in northwestern Rio Grande do Sul now feed billions of people on four continents. The grain that was once managed in the troughs of settlers has become the greatest asset of Brazilian agribusiness. And it has an address of origin: it's called Santa Rosa.
