An East Anglian farm manager hopes to learn lessons from Brazilian agriculture after winning a trip to South America to see how farming systems differ across the globe.

Jim Scarratt, who manages 2,600 acres of arable land on behalf of EW Porter and Sons, in Feltwell, near Thetford, will make the journey after winning a compettion run by agrochemical giant Syngenta.

His visit will include farm tours and visits to regional research centres to see how the country deals with disease challenges such as soya bean rust – a nemesis for Brazilian farmers in the same way that septoria tritici and yellow rust are for UK cereal growers.

'I've never been abroad to specifically look at other types of farming systems before, so I'm really interested to see how they manage the climate, pests and diseases, terrain and soil types, as well as learning about the different business outlooks,' said Mr Scarratt.

'It's going to be a great opportunity to learn from others, and bring home new ideas about how we could be doing things slightly differently here.'

Syngenta's competiton was run as part of the UK launch of its new fungicide, Elatus Era, which was first registered in Brazil, predominantly for the control of soya bean rust.

Andrew Curtis, the firm's fungicide campaign manager, said: 'This trip is an opportunity to see how farming systems differ across the world, and how they deal with different challenges such as disease and pest pressures.'