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LAS VEGAS – Jessica Andrade has credited her strength to a childhood spent helping tend to her family’s small farm in Brazil.

Now, we’re not telling the rest of the UFC’s strawweight roster to go grab the pitchforks and cornhuskers. But judging by ex-title challenger Claudia Gadelha’s assessment of her onetime opponent’s power, it seems whatever Andrade did in that farm worked.

“I was very surprised with her strength,” Gadelha told media, including MMAjunkie, during a recent media day in Las Vegas. “I compare her to a (125-pound) guy when it comes to strength and power. And I never felt that before, so I was very surprised. I think that I am way better than her, technically, but she’s just so much stronger, and that’s what made her win the fight.”

Gadelha (15-3 MMA, 4-3 UFC), who’s now set to meet Carla Esparza (13-4 MMA, 4-2 UFC) this weekend at UFC 225, came into a UFC Fight Night 117 meeting with Andrade (18-6 MMA, 9-4 UFC) on the strength of solid back-to-back wins – capped off by a dominant first-round submission victory over fellow ex-contender Karolina Kowalkiewicz. 

Andrade, in turn, came in as the underdog, on the heels of a losing title effort against then-champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk (14-2 MMA, 8-2 UFC). But that didn’t stop her from bloodying up Gadelha en route to a unanimous-decision win and a “Fight of the Night” bonus.

One could have understood if the setback made for a particularly bitter pill for Gadelha to swallow, considering her sole career losses to that point – including a razor-thin one she still contests – had come by the hands of Jedrzejczyk. But that wasn’t the case for the Brazilian, who sees no shame in losing to a “different animal” in her compatriot.

But she’s learned some lessons. While Jedrzejczyk found success against Andrade with a more elusive style, which basically kept her out of harm’s way, Gadelha’s more grappling-oriented game caused her to engage too much with Andrade’s power.

Gadelha doesn’t really think it’s possible to match Andrade’s very special brand of strong – the type she’d never felt in “any other woman,” flyweights included. But should the two rematch, which is something Gadelha wants, she’d bring in a different strategy.

“I want it again, and I’m sure one of the things I’m not going to do again is exchange power with her, because she’s so much powerful,” Gadelha said, before adding with a laugh, “She can go fight in the 125-male division, though.”

Speaking of rematches, Andrade, unsurprisingly, isn’t the only one Gadelha would like to settle the score with. While many things have happened since she last met Jedrzejczyk, including the champ’s dethroning at the hands of Rose Namajunas, the long-running feud between “The Ultimate Fighter 23” coaches is alive and well.

“My thing with Joanna is personal,” Gadelha said. “We hate each other. Even now, she’s not the champion, but I still want to fight her again. I want to punch her. I want to beat her ass. I just want it, because I don’t like her.”

Gadelha is not exactly alone in that sentiment. While Jedrzejczyk’s strong personality has always made for a somewhat polarizing figure, the backlash has grown stronger since the consecutive meetings with Namajunas. After the first loss, which ended in a first-round knockout, the ex-champ pinned it on a botched weight cut. She’d later contest the outcome of the second meeting, a unanimous decision that Jedrzejczyk thinks should have gone her way.

Gadelha, in turn, believes Namajunas beats Jedrzejczyk “10 times out of 10” and, most of all, is curious to see how the former champion deals, mentally, after Namajunas gave her a taste of her own poison.

“I think the loss kind of got her,” Gadelha said. “Because part of her game is breaking girls’ heads and breaking people down. Now, Rose did the same thing with her, and I think she’s kind of frustrated with that. …

“We spent a lot of time together at ‘The Ultimate Fighter 23,’ and I don’t know; there’s something about the way she looks, the way she acts. I see the changes in her personality.”

Before any of those rematches happen, though, there’s a fresh matchup that Gadelha needs to handle, in the FS1-televised preliminary card of Saturday’s UFC 225 event at United Center in Chicago.

Well, fresh-ish, anyway. Gadelha and Esparza came close to squaring off a couple of times before, when the two still fought for Invicta FC. Gadelha, however, had to withdraw both times, first due to a broken nose and then, she said, due to weight-cut-related illness.

As the two failed to make it to the cage to settle their differences, a beef brewed outside of it. Recently, Esparza told MMAjunkie Radio she believed the fellow contender had “some anger issues” and that, if it weren’t for USADA, she’d call “roid rage” on Gadelha.

“She’s always been kind of a big trash-talker,” Esparza said at the time. “We’ve had a little Twitter war, which came from nothing, back in the day.

“Even recently, she’s talked crap about me on her Instagram, calling me names. Even last year, out of nowhere talking crap about me, and right now, I think she called me a ‘dumbass’ and a ‘little girl.’”

Asked about the bad blood between the two, though, Gadelha kept it more tame than that.

“I really broke my nose 10 days before the fight, and the second time, I really got sick,” Gadelha said. “And she was talking a lot of (expletive) about all that. She said I was running from her. I’m not running from her. I got sick and I broke my nose. I just didn’t like with the way she dealt when all that happened to me.”

In any case, hopefully the two are finally going to get a chance to resolve this with some good old face-punching soon enough.

“I’m very excited about this,” Gadelha said. “I’ve been very careful with the way I’m training now because I don’t want to get hurt, I don’t want nothing to happen to my body now, and I’m ready to go this time.”

To hear from Gadelha, check out the video above.

And for more on UFC 225, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.