Brazilian farmers in the heart of the nation’s main grain belt may benefit from a new railway connecting northern Mato Grosso to Santos Port, Latin America’s largest export terminal in southeast Brazil.
The Mato Grosso State Railway, a 700-kilometer greenfield project being built since 2022 by Rumo SA, Brazil’s largest rail operator, has its first phase 70% complete.
The company, controlled by the Brazilian conglomerate Cosan SA, expects the line to boost its competitiveness in Mato Grosso, where grain output is projected to expand by 40 million tons, or 35%, over the next decade. Rumo alone plans to lift transport volumes in the state by 3 million tons annually.
The first stretch—162 kilometers from the company’s grain terminal in Rondonopolis, in southern Mato Grosso, to a new terminal near Campo Verde, further north—is expected to start operations in the second half of 2026.
The BR-070 terminal, as it’s being called, will have initial capacity for 10 million tons, expandable to 20 million. Rumo expects the site to attract crops from areas including Campo Verde, Primavera do Leste, Água Boa and parts of the Araguaia Valley, giving it an edge over rivals offering northern export routes.
Construction work
The AgriBiz visited the first-phase site this month, offering a glimpse of Brazil’s biggest greenfield rail project in four decades.
More than 5,000 workers are involved, with 3,000 living in temporary camps along the 162-kilometer stretch—about 90% of them from outside Mato Grosso. To mitigate execution risks, construction was divided into packages handled by different contractors.
Even with efforts to keep the project on time and on budget, Rumo had to raise its investment estimate by 40%, to 5 billion reais ($900 million). The cost overrun rattled investors, raising questions about budgets for later stages.
“Phase 1 gives us security for phase 2. Yes, we may have miscalculated capex at the start, but building the project gave us the know-how,” said Altamir Perottoni Junior, Rumo’s vice president of commercial operations, in an interview.
“Brazil hasn’t seen a greenfield rail project in decades, and even contractors struggled to price it.”
The staged rollout is designed not only to manage complexity but also to generate revenue from the first stretch to help fund the remainder, which still needs board approval.
Operations
Rumo expects the BR-070 grain terminal to ramp up quickly, since much of the demand already exists. Today, its Rondonopolis grain terminal handles more than 1,600 trucks a day during harvest, moving about 22 million tons annually.
Today, grains harvested in central Mato Grosso, for example, are trucked to the Rondonopolis terminal, where they are transferred to trains bound for Santos Port. The new line is expected to reduce truck traffic by shifting cargo onto the railway earlier.
“We won’t need a commercial ramp-up to fill volumes at the new terminal—we already have them,” Perottoni said.
As for the timing of subsequent phases, the company is cautious. “We’ll make the best decisions for Rumo. If we see lower interest rates next year, that would help. But we’ll move in line with demand,” Perottoni said.
Brazil’s benchmark interest rate is currently 15% a year, nearly the highest level in 20 years.
