Using a sequence of decennial farm censuses, we examine Brazil’s agricultural performance over the last several decades as the economy shifted slowly from a producer-protected to liberalized environment. Those shifts provide the data for investigating Brazilian policy’s implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency. We decompose mean-farm total factor productivity into frontier productivity and efficiency change, each of the two influenced independently by government policy. National technology growth is found to have been an exceptionally high 4.5% per annum. Because, however, average farms were unable to keep pace with it, TFP growth has been a much smaller 2.6% per year. Although frontier producers in the south have outperformed their northern counterparts, TFP growth in the south has been lower than in the north. Benefits from Brazil’s agricultural research system have been tilted toward the farming sector's technological leaders, widening the productivity gap between frontier and average producer. Credit, education, and road construction policies have instead narrowed that gap.