Moura Andrade started his work in 1938 or 1939, when the state of Mato Grosso acquired Caapora Farm on the right bank of the Paraná. He renamed it Spring Farm, built a river port, and used the location as a base for what would become a multi-decade land acquisition. In 1951 he bought the Ball Farm from the Barbosa Martins family, one of the old clans of what would become Mato Grosso do Sul. The pattern was consistent. He would buy a farm, integrate it into his operation, then advertise subdivisions to migrants with advantageous terms. Buyers streamed in from the Northeast, São Paulo, Paraná, and Minas Gerais. In the second half of 1957, he marked out a tract for a city. The first school opened that same year in a shack belonging to the street-building company. A brick building followed the next year, called the School Group Moura Andrade. On December 20, 1958, the settlement became a Village, a District, and a County on the same day.

The economic base that Moura Andrade chose for his valley was farming. It still is. Cattle and grain dominate the municipality, and the large farms he planned now produce for Brazil's agribusiness export market. The surrounding area was colonized quickly because he offered terms that outran competing land developers. Migration waves arrived in sequence. Northeasterners came first, followed by São Paulo and Paraná families, and then by settlers from Minas Gerais. The results show up in Nova Andradina's political genealogy. Mayors carry surnames like Soares, Faria, Mattos, Migliorini, Andrade, Bauermeister, Manicoba, Ortega, Hashioka, Garcia, and Sena. The Japanese surname Hashioka appears repeatedly. Roberto Hashioka Soller served three terms starting in 2001, a reminder that the Japanese-Brazilian presence in the farming southwest is significant, tracing back to immigration waves that began a century ago.

The river that Moura Andrade built his port against is one of the great water features of South America. The Paraná runs 4,880 kilometers from its confluence with the Paranaiba in southern Brazil to its merger with the Uruguay River forming the Rio de la Plata. It is the second-longest river on the continent, behind only the Amazon. For Nova Andradina, the Paraná was both the western boundary and the economic artery. Moura Andrade's port served his farms and later served the commercial agriculture that grew around them. Today dams along the river limit long-distance navigation, but the Paraná still organizes the geography. The Ivinhema Valley, for which Nova Andradina claims capital status, sits on a Paraná tributary. Nova Casa Verde, the main subdivision of the broader municipality, extends the urban core into the surrounding farmland.

Planned cities are not always well-planned cities. Between 1967 and 1969, Mayor Alcides Menezes de Faria worked to bring sanitation and electricity to Nova Andradina, about a decade after its founding. The new county had the geometric street grid and the school buildings, but the utilities had lagged behind the plat maps. That delay was typical of mid-twentieth-century frontier colonization in central Brazil. Cities materialized faster than infrastructure could catch up, and the results were sometimes messy. By the 1980s and 1990s, the basic services had caught up to the plan. Today Nova Andradina is a functioning agricultural center with the modern amenities of any Brazilian city of its size, though the outlying rural districts still feel the distance from the capital. The county's 4,776 square kilometers contain a lot of farmland and not enough pavement to reach every corner quickly.