Brazil’s Rumo to open Mato Grosso fertilizer rail terminal in April

Brazilian railway operator Rumo will open a new 7.5 million mt per year fertilizer terminal in Mato Grosso state in April, as producers in the remote hinterland state enter the peak negotiation period for securing inputs for the next grain crop that starts planting in September.

The rail terminal, which will get BRL 200 million ($63.3 million) in investments by the time it is finished, is part of a joint venture between Rumo and local fertilizer distributor JM-Link. It is the first of its kind in Brazil’s top grain producing state and will help producers lower their freight costs for operations in Mato Grosso and other centre-west grain states.

Until now, nearly all fertilizer shipments into the country’s leading soybean and corn producing region were carried in the back-haul routes of grain trucks circulating between Mato Grosso and the southern ports of Santos and Paranagua, where most of Brazil’s crop nutrients come in by sea.

As the world’s largest soybean exporter and second largest exporter of corn, Brazil is also one of the leading importers of fertilizer, importing three-quarters of its annual needs, according to Brazil’s fertilizer blenders association AMA.

Rumo, which is a unit of Brazilian energy and logistics conglomerate Cosan, operates four rail concessions with more than 12,000 km of railway and said it plans to start shipping fertilizer from the Port of Santos in Sao Paulo state to Mato Grosso’s main grain hub in Rondonopolis in April.

Rumo said the terminal will have the capacity to load 12,000 mt per day of fertilizer in trucks that will then distribute it to farms in the region. Arriving trains will be able to unload eight cars at once into underground automated elevators.

Mato Grosso is the country’s leading soybean and corn producing state and thus consumes 20%, or 6.7 million mt, of Brazil’s 34 million mt in annual sales of crop nutrients, according to Anda, the fertilizer industry association.