In 1835, a pioneer named Antonio de Paula e Silva came down from the older settlements of Minas Gerais with his family and the enslaved people who worked for him, and made camp on the banks of the Rio Grande. The river was the border then, as it is now, between the mineiro uplands and the open stretches that would become interior Sao Paulo. Land was abundant, the fruit was plentiful, and the grass fed cattle without much help. In 1850, the settlement was formally declared an arraial, a village with standing in the colonial order. In 1858, it became a district of the powerful municipality of Uberaba, only to be emancipated the same year under the name Carmo do Fructal. By 1887, it was officially a city, and the name had been clipped of its religious prefix. What remained was the fruit.

Frutal sits inside the Triangulo Mineiro, the strange geographic wedge where Minas Gerais juts west between Sao Paulo and Goias like a compass arm. The land is flat enough to farm easily, wet enough in summer to grow what is planted, and dry enough in winter to harvest without losing the crop to rot. Somewhere around the 1980s, the ancient patterns of small cattle ranching and corn cultivation gave way to industrial-scale agribusiness. Today the crops from above read like a catalog: 27,000 hectares of soybeans, 10,128 of sugarcane, 6,500 of oranges, and at least 5,000 each of corn and sorghum. A pineapple plantation covers 1,600 hectares. There are 157,000 head of cattle in the municipality, 53,000 of them dairy cows. The meat, the milk, the grain, the ethanol: a modest town of roughly 58,000 people shipping out calories by the trainload.

At 485 meters above sea level, Frutal sits in that sweet spot common to the Brazilian central plateau, high enough to moderate the heat, low enough that tropical crops thrive. The Rio Grande runs eight kilometers south, providing both the border and the irrigation. BR-153, known as the Transbrasiliana, skims past the town on its way from the Amazon north to the Uruguayan border south. Belo Horizonte, the state capital, sits 600 kilometers to the east. Uberlandia is closer, at 186 kilometers. The microregion of Frutal covers twelve municipalities and 16,840 square kilometers, and it is one of the most economically developed pieces of western Minas Gerais. One in three farms owns a tractor, a ratio that sounds unremarkable until you remember how recently that was not true.

Frutal has four hospitals with 133 beds and ten public health clinics. It has 13 municipal primary schools, 6 state ones, and 6 private. There are three higher-education institutes, including a campus of the Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais. Life expectancy runs to 74.7 years. The Municipal Human Development Index of 0.803, measured in 2000, placed the town 32nd out of 853 municipalities in the state and 495th out of 5,138 nationally. None of these numbers are dramatic, and that is the point. A place that grows soy and raises cattle does not usually end up with a median HDI in the top ten percent of the country. Frutal did. The agricultural boom turned into hospital beds and school seats, which is how agricultural booms are supposed to work but often don't.

The view from altitude shows the geography plainly: a dense green ribbon of riverine forest along the Rio Grande, and inland a geometric mosaic of cane, soy, pasture, and orange groves all running in the long parallel lines that mark mechanized cultivation. The town itself forms a compact urban grid tilted slightly off the cardinal directions, set back eight kilometers from the water. The small airport SNFU lies a few kilometers east of the urban center, a single strip serving the agricultural operations.