On Tuesday, May 21st, the IBIP group checked out of the hotel and started the day with a bus tour of the city of Lucas do Rio Verde by our friend and tour guide, Ricardo Arioli Silva. He explained how the town had grown tremendously, especially over the past 5 years (12% per year!), since its founding about 3 decades ago. New industries, neighborhoods, and markets have emerged all over Lucas, where previously only cornfields had existed.

For our first day in Lucas do Rio Verde, we had an early start and visited the Maggi Soybean Crushing Plant.  This company has 40,000 hectares of cropland and 41 warehouses. Between all of their facilities, they have a capacity of 2.6 million tons of storage. We learned all about their conversion process of soybeans to oil and how they extract and use all of the byproducts of this production.  Anything that does not turn into oil gets converted into feed for livestock because of the high protein content.

We had a free morning before our 11 am check out at SESC Pantanal. Some utilized this time to get some sun, some decided to catch up on sleep, and some chose to further explore the amenities of the hotel. One such amenity was the butterfly house. The house was very pretty with many different types of flowers and species of butterflies. There were butterflies all over the place and a lot of them would land on us (which some of us loved and some didn't love so much). One of our favorite butterflies was one with bright blue wings, but we couldn't figure out what type of butterfly it was.

On Saturday we woke up in a new place for all of us, the Pantanal wetlands in the state of Mato Grosso.  This place is located in the beautiful countryside of central-western Brazil. The name of the resort we are staying at is the SESC Pantanal, which is a non-profit organization whose goal is to promote and protect the Pantanal region after years of exploitation. After waking up, we went exploring throughout the resort to discover what amenities it offers.

This morning we departed from the Hotel Antonio's Palace Hotel in Piracicaba and went to the Viracopos Airport for a flight to Cuiaba Airport. At the Viracopos airport we said our goodbyes to Felipe and Brenda, as they were returning to Sao Paulo.  However, we will see both Brenda and Felipe during our last adventure in Rio de Janeiro.

Thursday was our last full day in Piracicaba, São Paulo.  We woke up bright and early to take a tour of Raízen Group Sugar Mill, a Brazilian subsidiary of Shell and Cozan.  Our hostess, Fatima, gave us a warm welcome and was happy to answer any of our questions about Raízen and the sugarcane industry as a whole. We began our tour by watching a video that briefly explained the history of Raízen and also the scale of the sugarcane industry, including the processes sugarcane must undergo to become sugar, ethanol, or biodiesel. 

On Wednesday, May 15th 2013 the IBIP group traveled to Caterpillar (CAT), followed by Case New Holland (CNH), and ended the day with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) ESALQ Junior Enterprise program. 

We got off to an early start this morning, checking out of our Avenida Paulista hotel a little after 7am.  Bunge was our first stop of the day on the northern part of São Paulo.  We had visited the Bunge research facility in Bradley, Illinois back in April so this was really our first opportunity to compare a United States agribusiness facility to a Brazilian one. 

Hi Everyone - We're safe and sound in Sao Paulo, and we had a successful start to our trip. We learned a lot today from Rabobank, UNICA, and Abiove. We also hosted a wonderful joint College of ACES and College of Business Alumni Reception in our hotel. Many Brazilian alums attended, and it was a huge success. We're experiencing slow internet connection and will hopefully be able to upload the blog and photos when we arrive in Piracicaba tomorrow evening. Stay tuned, but know that we are well!  Thanks for the patience.

We started the day with breakfast together at the hotel in Sao Paulo, then took an hour drive (within the vast city) over to Rabobank, which is one of the highest rated private banks in the world. Rabobank is also one of the most well-known and largest food and agricultural-focused lending institutions in the world.