El Niño Puts 250,000 Litres of Daily Milk Production at Risk

Poço Redondo is one of Brazil’s significant milk-producing municipalities. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics show that it produced 121m litres in 2024, generating 283.5m reais and placing it among the country’s 20 largest producers. Together with Porto da Folha and Nossa Senhora da Glória, it accounted for 316m litres, nearly half of Sergipe’s total production of 678.5m litres.

Figures from Sergipe’s agricultural development company, Emdagro, put annual output at 3,960 litres per cow in Poço Redondo. That compares with 2,336 litres per cow across the state and 1,343 litres nationally. Santa Rosa do Ermírio, a settlement within the municipality, is home to between 20,000 and 25,000 cows, while milk provides the main income for 90% of its families.

The settlement produces roughly 250,000 litres daily. Poço Redondo as a whole exceeds 300,000 litres a day, supplying companies including Piracanjuba, Nativille, Ouro Bom and Natulact. The immediate pressure has emerged in crop production: a survey by the news organisation among producers found that the region’s maize harvest had fallen by about 90%, reducing the supply of silage used to feed cattle.

“The bottleneck was this El Niño. We did not harvest crops to make silage for the cattle. There is very little silage,” said Odair José de Oliveira, president of the Friends of Milk Association of Santa Rosa do Ermírio. He said maize had failed to develop in some areas. Farmers have therefore been buying silage from other municipalities, mainly Carira in Sergipe and Pedro Alexandre in Bahia, at between 350 and 400 reais per tonne. Individual purchasing has limited their ability to negotiate larger volumes.

Remaining stocks on farms are expected by producers to last only until October. Oliveira said milk production in the area could decline by as much as 20%, depending on the intensity and duration of the weather phenomenon. Farmers have also been purchasing water brought from the São Francisco River since April, at an estimated cost of 450 reais per truckload. One farm is spending about 100,000 reais a month on transported water.

Producers presented two requests to Zeca Ramos da Silva, Sergipe’s secretary for agriculture, agrarian development and fisheries: a Banese state-bank credit line with low interest and a two-year repayment period to finance feed, and the cleaning of reservoirs used to store water. Oliveira said the secretary had undertaken to arrange the cleaning of about 400 reservoirs and to examine ways to assist with silage purchases.

A longer-term water-supply project for the area, known as the Milk Aqueduct, would draw raw water from the São Francisco River for farmers in five municipalities in the Alto Sertão. The project remains at the studies and design stage. As an emergency measure, the state water-resources and irrigation agency, Coderse, said that 103 reservoirs in Poço Redondo had been prepared since the beginning of 2025, including seven medium-sized facilities.

Wanda Tathyana de Castro Silva, a meteorologist at Sergipe’s environment secretariat, said rainfall had already been below average during the transition to El Niño and that the phenomenon was “already established” in the state. In May, the region was expected to receive 300mm to 350mm of rain but recorded about 180mm. She said warmer waters in the South Atlantic, east of Brazil’s Northeast, could support the formation of weather systems and bring rain, partially reducing the effects on the harvest and Sergipe’s dairy chain.