This dissertation analyzes the social formation and political development behind the production of scientific knowledge at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, known by its Portuguese acronym Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária). Embrapa was established as a public company under Brazil’s authoritarian military regime in 1973 with the goal of modernizing Brazilian agriculture and is credited as the technological engine behind the emergence of “the world’s first tropical agricultural giant.” However, in recent years, Embrapa has endured political uncertainty, internal conflict and a reduction in its budget, leading to an institutional crisis. The technocrats who helped design and manage Embrapa were convinced of the need to send scientists abroad for postgraduate education and apply scientific expertise to industrial commodity production in the countryside. It was during these early decades when Embrapa gained currency as an effective institutional model for public agricultural research. I use the concept Techno-tropicalismo to show how the institutional and scientific hybridization of Western and Brazilian agronomic knowledge at Embrapa subsumed tropical ecologies into a vision of industrial order and progress in Brazil. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I argue that the effectiveness of public research isn’t due to the institutional model, but rather the alignment between state development goals, a continuity in financial support and internal social cohesion. The chapters in this dissertation provide a detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of public agricultural research in Brazil. Each of them focus on different scales around the development and deployment of agricultural research in Brazil, from the transnational and national, and from the institutional and local. They also address distinct moments and components of Embrapa. While the chapters are not presented chronologically, they do follow a general timeline that weaves from the past and up to the present. Taken together, the chapters utilize Embrapa as a productive lens to understand how and why national agricultural research systems produce particular forms of knowledge and technologies. In the case of Embrapa, I show how the transmission of generalized and embedded knowledge from the global to the local is uneven, contested and shaped by economic, political, cultural, and environmental interests.