Embrapa launches database with information on national agriculture

How was sugarcane production in the Ribeirão Preto region in 2014? What has been the evolution of the size of the northeastern goat herd in the last decade? What is the area planted with soybeans in the Municipality of Pedro Afonso (TO) in the last five years? The answers to these and many other questions about Brazilian agricultural production are now easily accessible on data base developed by Embrapa's Strategic Intelligence System, Agropensa, based on information from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

"It is a broad database collected since the 1990s provided through a user-friendly platform of interactive panels (dashboards)", says the coordinator of Agropensa, researcher Édson Bolfe, who considers the tool a valuable source of information for researchers, journalists, public managers, professionals in the field, businesspeople, financial analysts and interested parties in general. The system developed transforms the data into results analysis tables that can present the cut and detail that the user chooses.

The base has just been made available on the new page of Agropensa on the Embrapa portal and was organized by the Secretariat of Intelligence and Macrostrategy (SIM) in partnership with the Company's Department of Information Technology (DTI). "The information, coming from IBGE, is traditionally available in the form of tables. We developed a presentation that can be quickly accessed by clicking on the maps and data of interest through graphs, comparative analyzes and reports", explains Bolfe, highlighting that it is of an innovative platform that uses Business intelligence (BI) and which makes up the recently redesigned architecture of the Agropensa page.

The data is distributed into three large groups: livestock, agricultural production and slaughter. In livestock farming, it is possible to investigate the production of the main livestock: cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, buffaloes, horses and chickens. The size of each herd can be monitored each year from 1990 to 2014, the most recent harvest recorded. The search can be done by region of Brazil, state, region of the state and municipality.

In the same group, the main products of animal origin can be observed, such as milk, wool, honey, chicken and quail eggs, with numbers of cows milked and sheep shorn by geographic region. There is even information about silkworm cocoon production.

The database presents important data on national aquaculture from 2013. With this, it is possible to know, for example, where twenty different species of fish are produced, as well as other fish such as oysters and shrimp. You can know, for example, that Brazil produced 139 thousand tons of tambaqui in the 2014 harvest, generating more than 750 million reais with this fish and that the majority of production came from the State of Amazonas, where 105 thousand tons came from .

In addition to the size and value of production, the agricultural data in the database also includes the extent of the harvested area and the average yield of each of the 65 crops that comprise the country's main crops. For crops such as corn, for example, there are still it is possible to observe data on the first and second harvest of the grain. On the main page there are shortcuts to the largest Brazilian agricultural crops: corn, sugar cane, soybeans, rice, beans, coffee, cotton and oranges.

In "slaughter", the user has an equally considerable degree of detail. You can choose a certain tanning method (chrome, tannin or others) carried out on leather produced only in municipal slaughterhouses in a given state or sub-region. It is possible to monitor the production of federal, state and municipal slaughterhouses of cattle, chickens, pigs and steers, for example.

"This is one of the databases used by Agropensa, it is a practical and modern work tool that can be applied for the most different purposes of rural strategic planning," says Bolfe, "our objective was to facilitate access to public information produced by Embrapa and partners". The researcher reveals that in the next stage the system will be expanded with data on the export of agricultural products and will involve other sources in addition to the Embrapa and IBGE databases.

The Agropensa

Coordinated by Embrapa's Intelligence and Macrostrategy Secretariat, the Agropensa Strategic Intelligence System supports the formulation of research, development and innovation strategies for the Company and partners. Agropensa explores trends and prepares scenarios for the agricultural sector, seeking to predict opportunities and challenges for scientific research to prepare for.