Bryan Gruley and Shruti Singh – Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 07/05/2012
On a scorching afternoon in the savanna of eastern Brazil, Wilson Horita is 8 feet above the ground, bouncing on the driver’s seat of the new green-and- yellow tractor parked on his family’s farm.
“It’s totally pneumatic,” he tells a visitor. Horita doesn’t drive tractors, he buys them. “Let’s talk about comfort,” he says, speaking in Portuguese as another Brazilian, perched on the ladder to the cab, translates.
“There’s totally acoustic insulation,” Horita says, meaning the cab dulls the roar of the 270-horsepower engine and the clank of row-crop planters slicing through soil. “And,” he continues, sounding more like a car salesman than the farmer he is, “there’s air conditioning.”
