Closely watched Brazilian research firm Agroconsult said Tuesday that better highway conditions were among its principal findings after a 60,000-kilometer, two-month road trip through the country's main soybean-growing regions.

Agroconsult analysts, traveling in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks with journalists and sponsors, took samples from more than 1,100 soybean fields during its ninth-annual Rally Da Safra crop tour from January to March.

The data questionairres filled out for each sample were designed mainly to estimate a given field's productivity, in 60-kilogram (132-pound) sacks of soybeans per hectare. Each questionairre also included a simple evaluation of area roads, which could be characterized as good, reasonable or poor.

In this year's crop tour, analysts judged 69% of the roads they traveled to be good or excellent, up from 42% in 2011. Only 9% of roads were poor or very poor, down from 21% last year.

"It improved, probably as a reflection of investments by the federal government and also the state governments," Agroconsult director Andre Pessoa said in a press conference.

Agroconsult's assessment of rural roads amounts to anecdotal evidence--from a uniquely qualified, independent source--that the Brazilian government's ongoing push to modernize the country's infrastructure is paying off.

Pessoa said good road conditions were widespread in Brazil's main soybean-producing regions in the south, southeast and center-west of the country.

"The frontier regions continued with the same difficulties as always," he added.

In another positive development, Agroconsult estimated that only 2.8% of this year's soybean productivity was lost by mechanical harvesters, down from 3.8% in 2011. That data is calculated by laying a large, metal ring on a recently harvested field, painstakingly counting the number of soya grains in it, repeating the process several times and converting the total grain count into 60-kilogram sacks per hectare.

On the other hand, Agroconsult discovered a higher incidence of pests and diseases affecting Brazilian soybean fields, which Pessoa was likely associated with weather conditions. In southern Brazil, plants came under heavy stress from a months-long drought that reduced productivity by more than 50% in some places. Excessive rain in parts of central-western Brazil allowed Asian rust fungus to flourish.

In line with a recent trend, Agroconsult also found that use of transgenic seeds continued increasing last year. Of the fields Agroconsult visited this year, 87% tested positive for transgenic seeds, up from 82% in 2011 and 72% the previous year.

-By Paul Kiernan, Dow Jones Newswires; (+55)11-3544-7074, paul.kiernan@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 03, 2012 18:48 ET (22:48 GMT)