Opening.asc files in QGIS?

I just downloaded one of the files in the repository that you linked to (brazil_yield.asc) and tried to import the file into another GIS program. I also ran into an import error. I finally tracked the error down to an attempt to convert a blank cell to a numerical type. In other words, there are blanks in the file because they have been improperly formatted. Rewriting the import tool to ignore blank cells resulted in a successful import. There are several places in the file that have two spaces in a row. See the figure below.

For a proper space delimited file, there can only be one space between each number.