The town began in 1850 when Joaquim Fernandes de Castro and Jose Pereira Cardoso began building a chapel on the banks of the Ribeirao Santa Barbara, a tributary of the Corumba River. The pattern is familiar across central Brazil. Chapel, then village, then district, then city, each stage measured in decades. In 1890, the settlement became the district Capela dos Correias. In 1909, it was promoted to city status under the name Campo Formoso. That name lasted thirty-four years. Then came the 1943 contest. A name can say something about a town's self-image, and Orizona told a specific story about rice country, a place defined by what grew in its flooded fields. Other names had to settle for runner-up. The town kept the winner and moved on.

Cachaça is not rum, and people in Orizona take this seriously. Rum is distilled from molasses, a byproduct of refining sugar. Cachaça is distilled from freshly-pressed sugarcane juice, which gives it a cleaner, more vegetal flavor profile. Brazilians call it pinga, caninha, aguardente, cana, or simply me. Orizona has about thirty small distilleries producing high-quality cachaça, some of it bound for export markets. The scale is boutique compared to the industrial cachaça operations of Minas Gerais or the Northeast, but the small-distillery model allows for careful aging and careful claims about terroir. For a town of roughly fourteen thousand people, thirty distilleries is a meaningful concentration. The sugarcane fields that feed them share space with the corn, soybeans, rice, coffee, and passion-fruit plantings that diversify the farm economy.

Orizona is the fifth-largest milk producer in Goias. Several milk processing factories receive over a million liters a day. Out of roughly two thousand milk producers, about 90 percent are small farmers, which means the dairy economy here is built on a dense network of small operations rather than a handful of industrial feedlots. The cattle herd numbers 127,000 head. Poultry runs higher, at 931,400. The corn and soybean acreage is substantial too, 3,300 hectares and 25,000 hectares respectively. Along with the dairies, the town hosts mining companies extracting phosphates and sand from the local geology. The brickworks provide a small additional layer of industry. Two financial institutions, Banco Itau and Banco do Brasil, serve the local economy, a modest presence that reflects the town's modest scale.

Something unusual for Goias shows up in the census data. A large part of the Orizona population still lives in the countryside. In 2007, 7,673 people lived in the urban area, and 6,707 lived in the rural area. That is close to a fifty-fifty split, in a state where most municipalities have gone 85 or 90 percent urban. The geographic position helps explain it. Orizona sits 138 kilometers from Goiania and 200 from Brasilia, which makes it close enough to the state capital to trade with but far enough to avoid being absorbed. It is part of the Pires do Rio microregion, a cluster of small farm municipalities between Goiania and the Minas Gerais border. Two rivers bathe the town, the Corumba and the Piracanjuba, both running toward the Paranaiba watershed. The land here slopes gently, the rainfall is reliable, and the farmers have stayed.