Coffee Origin Focus: Brazil – part 3 Key Producing Regions
- Igor Bragato
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Brazil is a big country, and its coffee production is not a monolith. It is in fact a series of microclimates, each with their own characteristics, strengths, and vulnerabilities. In order to gain true understanding of this quintessential coffee origin, we need to go deeper than talking about “Brazilian Coffee,” we need to understand the production regions.
Understanding Brazil’s producing regions is key to forecasting Brazil’s coffee production, and what the impact of weather events will be. However, more than just a series of data points, Brazil’s coffee production is actually a story, and like many good stories, this one begins with a crisis.
A series of events in the past decades reshaped Brazil’s coffee production geography to a point where the growing regions we recognize today are vastly different from those in the past, and the opportunities and threats have also evolved.
In this article, the final one of our 3-part, Brazil series, we break down the crises that shaped Brazil’s coffee production map, how the producing regions evolved over time, and how this translates into volume and variety today.
The Shift in Production Regions
Brazil’s current coffee-growing regions are the result of events in the 1930s, 1970s and 1990s, which were structural turning points to shifting the geography of production.
If nowadays production is mostly concentrated in the Center South plateaus, in famous regions like South Minas and Espírito Santo, back then coffee was mostly grown further south, in São Paulo and Paraná.
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This shift of coffee production wasn’t caused by a single event, but by a series of events over decades, from land exhaustion, weather risks, rising land prices and urbanization to a push for mechanization, efficiency and scale. In the next sections, we’ll analyze each one of these events.
1930s: The South Minas Rise
In the start of the last century, Brazil’s coffee-growing map was largely different from today’s. São Paulo (especially the Paraíba Valley) concentrated most of production (well over 50%), but in the 1930s that this role started to shift to South Minas.
Back then, São Paulo had the ideal conditions for growing coffee: fertile soils, expanding railroads and quick access to ports (like Santos) due to proximity. But after more than a century of growing coffee, steady cultivation depleted soil nutrients, and lands become less fertile.
Meanwhile, São Paulo’s rapid urbanization was contributing to increasing land prices and reducing the availability of large, contiguous farming areas. There was ultimately a huge opportunity cost in continuing to grow coffee there.
At that time, the South Minas plateaus emerged as a new frontier for coffee production. South Minas ultimately took over because it was the ideal fit at the right moment: it was nearby São Paulo (towards the north), had land availability, fertile soils, warmer temperatures and flat terrains for modern mechanized farming.
1970s: Frosts Accelerate the Shift
The transition accelerated significantly in the 1970s, driven by major frost events. Back then, while São Paulo lost relevance and South Minas was ascending, Paraná became the main producer, accounting for more than half of Brazil’s output.
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But in the 1970s, there were big frosts that completely changed how Brazilian production is distributed, effectively ending Paraná’s dominance, from producing ~55% of total output in the 1970s to only ~2% in the 2020s.
As the southernmost coffee-growing region, Paraná was the coldest, hence the most affected by frosts during winter. The frost events were several in that decade, the most impactful being in 1975, referred to as the “Great Black Frost”.
Black frosts are the most lethal type of frost to coffee plants, because unlike white frost (which only causes superficial damage) it affects the plant internally, puncturing it from inside out, while killing internal tissues.
After that event, millions of trees were either killed or severely damaged, and a large portion of crops in Paraná ended up destroyed. This drove on of the biggest price rallies in the coffee market history, while Paraná production collapsed in the following years.
So, after 1975, Brazil production started to reallocate to regions with warmer temperatures and better long-term prospects, and this largely accelerated the production shift that started taking place in the 1930s: away from Paraná and southern São Paulo, towards Minas Gerais (South Minas, Cerrado) and later into Espírito Santo and other regions.
By that time, Espírito Santo was already shifting to Conilon due to its higher temperatures and low altitude, but this transition was reinforced by the 1970s climate shocks, while Conilon expanded in regions where Arabica was less viable.
1990s: The Push for Mechanization
The 1990s marked the final redistribution phase of coffee in Brazil, driven primarily by a push for mechanization and efficiency. This was a catalyst to increase cultivation in certain regions.
The collapse of the ICO quota system in 1989 meant higher price volatility, and this incentivized Brazilian farmers to prioritize lower production costs by optimizing scalability and efficiency.
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In that context, mechanization became a defining feature to increase operational scale and reduce labor costs, and this favored expansion in regions with a flat topography like South Minas, Cerrado and parts of Bahia.
At that same time, global demand was evolving towards higher-quality beans (post 1989 price crisis) and this contributed to increasing the importance of Cerrado and South Minas as famous regions for specialty high-quality coffee.
Brazil’s Coffee Production Nowadays
Nowadays, South Minas and Espírito Santo are essentially the heart of Brazilian coffee production and specialized in Arabica and Robusta, respectively. To grasp the size of each, let’s think of this metaphor.
Imagine that South Minas and Espírito Santo are two big 220-lb men each. Then Cerrado and Alta Mogiana would be skinny 120-lb teenagers, while Paraná, Bahia and Rondônia 60-lb young kids. Rio de Janeiro, Goiás and North Minas would be like little babies.
The point here is that there's a hierarchy between the growing regions.
The significance of this geographic scale is not just volume, but also climate and distance. Brazil is often viewed as a single coffee origin, but in reality, it is a vast and regionally diverse. The country’s balloon-like shape contains a big coffee-growing area that spans over a 1,000 miles square, covering multiple regions, each with its own distinct microclimates.
Arabica is mostly produced in South Minas, which is a large plateau localized in the Center South of Brazil. It is famous not only for producing the largest Arabica output, but also for its specialty coffees. Irrigation has traditionally been uncommon in South Minas, but after recent years of drought, many farmers have begun adopting it.
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A few hundred miles to the north is Cerrado, and to the south is Alta Mogiana, two regions that are also very notorious for their high-quality beans (Cerrado, in special), and mechanized harvest in flat terrains. Cerrado is often irrigated, because of its own microclimate, which tends to be drier.
While the vast majority of Arabica is concentrated in these regions, Robusta is concentrated further north. In fact, the distinction between the Arabica and Robusta regions is quite easy to grasp, because it’s a function of geography and microclimate.
Espírito Santo, Bahia and Rondônia are the only Conilon (Robusta) regions, and the reason is simple: these regions are naturally better suited for Robusta than Arabica. They have lower altitudes (often in coastal plains like in ES) and higher average temperatures, since these are the northernmost regions.
The hot climate is often accompanied by dry spells during key stages of crop development like flowering, and to compensate for it, the crops in Espírito Santo and Bahia are commonly irrigated.
Rondônia is rarely irrigated because it’s localized in the Amazon region, so it has high natural rainfall from the forest’s humidity. It seems to be the fastest-growing producing region in Brazil today, with most crops (~45%) being of young age, between 1 to 5 years old, according to our farmer survey data.
Rondônia is also Brazil’s most geographically isolated coffee-producing region, far removed from the country’s traditional coffee areas in the Center-South, and about 1,600 miles from the other Robusta-growing regions.
Applying Brazil’s Regional Knowledge
Over the past few years, we have been applying this regional knowledge not only to forecast the size of Brazil’s crop, but also to break it down by variety and understand of how crops are evolving per region in terms of age, geography, and planted area.
By interviewing hundreds of farmers across Brazil’s coffee regions, we’ve been producing in-depth reports that provide estimates of Brazil’s coffee crop. If you’d like to test it for yourself, we invite you to start a free trial of our Silver Coffee Research.
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