The name for Brazil's tropical high plains is the Brazilian Portuguese word cerrado which translates to English as a "closed, inaccessible wasteland." Until the early 1970s that was a good description; the cerrado was literally an inaccessible, useless wasteland. The region produced little of value and could not be productively cultivated. It was isolated from the rest of Brazil by lack of roads or other modern transport access.

The region began to open in the 1960s with the building of Brasilia, the new capital city. The first commercial agriculture enterprises to start up in the cerrados were extensive livestock operations. Viable crop agriculture was not feasible. No one knew how to farm the poor soils (see soil analyses), and there were no crops adapted to conditions of the region.

This situation changed dramatically in the late 1970s with the development of the "tropical" soybean and with new techniques for managing cerrado soils. Large scale plantings of soybeans began in 1980, and in following years the crop swept across the accessible cerrado areas like a prairie wildfire.

Viable crop agriculture in the cerrados brought a mass population movement into the region. Most of the migrants were farmers from southern states of Brazil. Cheap land was the attraction; for every hectare of land they sold in the south, they could buy 10 to 40 hectares or more in the cerrados. At the outset of the migration in the early 1980s, a hectare of Western Bahia land could be bought for the equivalent of the price of a pack of cigarettes. Those days are gone:Today, virgin land sells for US$250 or more per ha.