Soft Commodity Infrastructure (Brazil)

Where Brazilian farms connect to markets. This is the geolocated midstream of Brazilian agriculture: the silos, slaughterhouses, dairy plants, and sugar/ethanol mills that farms sell into, plus the cooperatives that farms belong to. It exists to answer, for any rural property, who to contact about deforestation on the land — the cooperative that has the farmer as a member, or the buyer that receives their grain, cattle, or cane.

Brazil only. 83,811 rows across seven GeoParquet files, describing 40,669 distinct entities. All geometry is WGS84 (EPSG:4326).

What is here

One collection, facilities, with seven files.

BR_facilities is a union of the other six plus 3,103 modelled catchment polygons, so the seven row counts overlap. Do not add them together and call the result a facility count.

Tiers inside BR_facilities, measured over all 40,669 rows:

How it was made

Every point comes from a government registry, or is geocoded from one. Nothing is guessed from satellite imagery.

• Grain silos — CONAB's national warehouse registry (ArmazensCadastrados), which every grain warehouse must register with. It ships real GPS coordinates, so these are exact.
• Slaughterhouses and dairy plants, federal — MAPA's SIF registry. It has the company, tax ID, and address but no coordinates, so the addresses were geocoded.
• Slaughterhouses and dairy plants, state and municipal — the smaller local plants the federal list misses. These live in MAPA's SISBI system, which has no bulk download. Trase pulled the SISBI records and geocoded them from the registry addresses.
• Sugar and ethanol mills — ANP's ethanol producer list. No street address, so each mill sits at its town's centre.
• Cooperative membership — IBGE's Censo Agropecuário 2017, counting how many farms in each município belong to a cooperative. A density signal, not a named cooperative, but it works even in remote frontier towns.
• Municipality geometry — IBGE's official município boundaries.

Trust labels on every row

Not every point is equally precise, so each row carries two labels.

basis is observed (37,566 rows) or modelled (3,103 rows, the gravity catchments only).

geom_method records how the coordinate was set. Five values occur:

Access

No credentials. The files are plain HTTPS GeoParquet, so DuckDB reads them in place. This query was run against the published files:

The five nearest grain silos to Sinop, Mato Grosso:

Do not wrap geometry in ST_GeomFromWKB. DuckDB's spatial extension reads the GeoParquet geometry column as GEOMETRY('OGC:CRS84') already, and ST_GeomFromWKB on it raises a binder error. Use the column directly.

More worked queries, the join keys, and the traps are in AGENTS.md.

Provenance

This is the official publication from the World Resources Institute, not a mirror. WRI compiled, geocoded, unified and published it. The underlying records belong to CONAB, MAPA (SIF and SISBI), ANP, IBGE, and Trase, each credited as a producer in the collection metadata.

Pipeline, tests, and a plain-language writeup live at github.com/wri/rural-land, under soft_commodity_infrastructure/METHODOLOGY.md.

The snapshot was compiled on 2026-07-23. CONAB's registry drifts daily; exact source snapshot dates are recorded in the pipeline repository.

Known limits

• Geocoded and municipality-centroid points are approximate. A geocode can land on the wrong lot, and a centroid sits at the middle of the town.
• Cooperative membership is a per-município count, not a named cooperative. 313 of the 5,570 municipalities carry no membership row at all.
• Rice, cotton, and coffee are not covered. No authoritative open geolocated source exists for them.
• Three municipality geometries fail an OGC validity test (self-intersection). They are published unrepaired, as received from IBGE.

License

CC-BY-4.0.

Attribution: Soft Commodity Infrastructure (Brazil), WRI. Sources: CONAB, MAPA/SIF, ANP, IBGE, Trase (SISBI).

Contact

Tristan Grupp (WRI), tristan.grupp@gmail.com. Catalog metadata, the data pipeline, and issues all live in github.com/wri/rural-land (private as of 2026-08-20).

An LLM-oriented summary of this catalog, with the join keys and the traps, is at llms.txt.