An American in Brazil

From Al-Jazeera, via Big Picture Agriculture:

Phil Corzine, a fourth-generation farmer from Illinois, is living the American dream, but it's happening on dusty soy farms in the interior of Brazil, rather than the cornfields of Iowa.
Corzine, 53, owns or manages seven farms in Goias and Tocantins states in the agricultural heartland of Brazil.
He started farming in Brazil in 2004, and now his company, South American Soy, has 100 foreign investors from the US, is worth about $6m, and has started to turn a profit the past two years.
"I could have never dreamed I would be down here managing a farm in Brazil. It's quite a leap from where I started," Corzine told Al Jazeera, while watching tractors off in the distance churn up soil preparing the land for a soybean season.
For Corzine, the difficulties of navigating Brazil's bureaucracy and the poor infrastructure are offset by cheap and plentiful farmland that is a fraction of the cost of the US.
A productive, sought-after piece of farmland in the US sells between $12,000 and $15,000 an acre, Corzine said, while a comparable piece of land in Brazil costs between $500 and $1,500 per acre.
"I can buy a lot more land down here with a lot less money," Corzine said. "For example, a 5,000-acre track of farm pasture with sufficient rainfall for soybeans is hard to find for sale in the US right now. And that is what I have down here in Brazil, and there is a lot more of it available here. So it's price and availability that drives what we are doing."

Better him than me.  Even though my neighbors tell me Obama is ruining America, I'd much rather be here than there., no matter how profitable farming may be down there.