Farms covering as much as 50,000 acres were commonplace in some of the main farming areas of Brazil where Raymond Crawford of Maguiresbridge has just visited.

Travelling in a delegation from the British Limousin Society his first impressions were slightly off-putting - confronting people wearing face masks as protection from swine flu.

Here he takes up his story of his epic visit.

"On my first day I went to the herd of Jose Carlos Dornelles Berta, former President of the Charolais Cattle Society and for the last two years, he has won the Champion Charoliss award. He had 1800 ha of rice and soya and 500 ha of grassland. This is when I realized that walking onto a 60-acre farm was over for two weeks. A farm is not called a farm in Brazil if it's less than 200 ha so if that was adopted in Northern Ireland there would not be to many farms. Along with his pedigree Charolais herd of 100 cows, he also had a commercial herd of Angus.

"The next farm we went to was owned by the current President of the Brazilian Angus Society, who farmed 20,000 ha, 700 of which was for growing soya. On this farm they finished 3000 steers a year, ran 2000 commercial sucklers, 600 pedigree Angus cows, and is the fourth generation on the farm and sells all his pedigree bulls at four years old. This was the most beautiful farm I have ever been on, the views of the fields as far as the eye could see all in one block with lanes going through the fields, all laid out in paddocks and these gauchos (farm workers) in the distance on horseback working with the cattle, rounding them up. It was their winter and the temperature was 28 degrees. I then travelled for five hours down to the very south of Brazil, only four miles from the ocean to another farm. Traveling in the lane to the farm was 12 miles and it was like travelling along sand dunes on the beach in a small car avoiding the humps, I thought to myself is there going to be anything left of this car when I get out of her. When we arrived at this farm, the grass land very poor, this farmer had 600 cows farming in very hard poor conditions.

"That night I had my first experience of a Churascara restaurant. This is where they bring all types of meat to your table, all freshly cooked as much as you can eat. Well this was my first experience of eating chicken hearts and in Brazil they waste nothing.

"The next day I drove six hours due west to the family of Jose Roberto Webber and his wife Suzanne and son Rodricco and daughter Roberta. Jose who gave up the city life as a lawyer and professor is currently President of the Brazilian National Herdbook which is in charge of the registrations of all the pedigree native breeds. He is currently vice-president of the Aberdeen Angus Association. I stood in one of his fields of 900 acres being peppered for rice by two tractors and ploughs that you can buy for £10,000 back home. But back home you would have an outfit costing maybe £60,000 in a 20-acre field. The sheer size was breathtaking as far as the eye could see all belonging to one family. Here I saw a calf just born so I checked it for traceability where its mother was. I was not long finding out. Mr. Webber came to the Royal Show in England last year and after a series of meetings with Defra, his farm is now accredited for export and traceability. This has led me to believe that there has to be inward missions to Europe by the Brazilian farmers to be educated. That is the way forward if they are going to be players in the European market.

"The ex-pointer show was set in 600 acres, with everything you could ever imagine there. There were breeds of cattle that you thought were from another planet. From what I have seen I believe imports of beef will be four times the previous amount. From the farms we have seen, the traceability meets the standards set out by the EU. In the UK, the average consumption of beef per head is 35 kgs, the southern America equivalent is 58 kgs and in Argentina 73 kgs. If we educated our people here to eat 1 kg per head more beef in the year it would totally saturate any threat from imports of beef and increase the demand by millions of tonnes of extra beef needed in the UK market.

"One of the ways is to educate people on cooking beef properly. I went with an open mind and to do business. I see brazil as an opportunity not a threat and the Brazilians are very keen to do business and are doing business with UK in sourcing and using British genetics. The world is in a global recession. It will in my view take in the region of three to four years until we completely get over it and be on an upward trend, but the downturn of that will be the rise over the years in fuel costs and one of the biggest polluters in the world is the shipping industry which pumps out pure tar.

The greens and environmentalists will not allow this to continue thus the shipping industry is going to have to change their system to a more environmental method. This will increase the cost in shipping hence the cost of importing beef to UK immensely and it will not make it viable in the medium term and be cheaper for the supermarkets etc to source beef at home. So the industry has now a window of opportunity to increase the market share of beef consumption here by communicating, etc.

I told the Brazilian farmers in my interviews that farmers in the UK have to abide by strict rules, guidelines on animal welfare traceability, cross compliance etc, If you put in place the same rules and abide by them , then you are free to trade if not then we will not support the importation of your beef into our country.