The name itself is a puzzle that unfolds in two Indigenous languages. Goia comes from the Goia people, the original inhabitants of this stretch of the high central plateau. Tuba is a Tupi-Guarani word meaning big. Put them together and Goiatuba means, literally, big Goias. It is a proud name, slightly oversized for a town that only became a city in 1931. The first settlers were ranchers from Minas Gerais who crossed the Paranaiba in 1860 looking for land. By 1892, enough of them had arrived that someone donated a parcel for a proper town, which was then called Bananeiras after the wild bananas growing thickly in the area. When the first chapel went up, it became Sao Sebastiao das Bananeiras. The bananas are gone. The name kept changing. The Goia people are gone too, their language preserved only in the first half of a municipal title.

Polenghi is the reason the world has accidentally tasted Goiatuba. The dairy produces soft-serve mix and other frozen dessert products that feed McDonald's Brazilian operation, which is enormous. But Polenghi is just one name on a surprisingly long list of industrial enterprises rooted in a small agricultural town. Goiasa distills alcohol. Sementes Selecta produces seeds. Bouquet makes bedding. Two fertilizer plants, Adubos Sul Goiano and Adubos Terra Verde, supply the surrounding farms. Sao Salvador Alimentos and Frangoiano process poultry. Globoaves, the poultry giant, keeps operations here too. And all of this industrial activity sits on top of a foundation of 98,100 head of cattle, 62,000 hectares of soybeans, and 10,750 hectares of corn. The town processes what the land produces, and ships the results outward.

The United Nations Human Development Index measured Goiatuba at 0.812 in 2000, putting it fourth out of 242 municipalities in Goias state and 350th nationally among 5,507. In practical terms, that means the dairy paychecks and the soy revenues stayed at home. The town has 24 schools with 9,253 students, three hospitals with 139 beds, and a campus of the Universidade Estadual de Goias. Literacy runs to 88.8 percent. These are not Western European numbers, but they are not the rural Goias of fifty years ago either. When the ranchers' children got jobs at the dairy and the fertilizer plant, something happened to the ratio of paved roads to dirt ones, of clinic beds to house calls. Prosperity in the Brazilian interior can be quiet, but it leaves traces.

Goiatuba sits at 775 meters on the gently rolling savanna that covers most of central Goias, the cerrado. The climate is reliably tropical. Hot wet summers, warm dry winters, and temperatures that cycle between 19 and 30 degrees Celsius most of the year. The Paranaiba River runs 50 kilometers south, forming the boundary with Minas Gerais, and BR-153 passes ten kilometers from the town, linking it north to Goiania 176 kilometers away and south to the industrial belt around Sao Paulo. The cerrado itself has a particular beauty from the air. Twisted trees, open grass, and termite mounds punctuating the red soil. Most of Goiatuba's agricultural land was cerrado within living memory, cleared in the great push of mechanized farming that transformed interior Brazil from the 1970s onward. The soy fields run to the horizon now where wild cashew and buriti palm once dominated.

From cruising altitude, Goiatuba looks like a red-earth grid set inside a patchwork of center-pivot irrigation circles and the geometric fields of industrial soybean production. The town's main highway arteries radiate outward in three directions, with the industrial zone DIAGO concentrated on the eastern side. The Paranaiba River corridor is visible to the south, a dark meandering green line that marks the state border.