The Green Wave of Coffee: Beginnings of Tropical Agricultural Research in Brazil (1885-1900)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European and North American urban and industrial demand for tropical plantation crops greatly expanded because of improvements in transportation and marketing. The traditional, empirical farming practices on those plantations contrasted strikingly with those of the economies they supplied, where scientific knowledge was being intensively applied to every line of production. It is not surprising that efforts would be made to transfer to tropical regions what already had been discovered by European and North American agricultural scientists. One of the most critical chapters in the history of scientific tropical agriculture is that of the founding of the Agronomic Institute of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. Located in the city of Campinas, it was the premier agricultural research center in the largest country of the tropical world, and was the model for its present-day agricultural research network. Furthermore, unlike almost all the other centers of the tropical world, it was not a colonial project; on the contrary, it was intended to help preserve Brazil’s economic independence, endangered by the increasing pressures of the imperialist powers.¹

The application of agricultural research to the basic problems of the Brazilian farm sector at that relatively early date in the development of agronomic science was also a measure of immense potential significance, at the time only barely glimpsed. The country’s history had been marked by cycles of boom and bust. Brazil repeatedly developed exports for which its natural endowments gave overwhelming comparative advantage. The resultant profits inevitably attracted competitors. As Brazil’s initial advantage faded, it did not seek to improve productivity, but abandoned the field, either to take up some other product, or, if none was obviously at hand, simply to slump into depression. The decision to introduce scientific methods in export agriculture suggested dissatisfaction with this passive economic role. During the nineteenth century, Brazil had risen to dominance in the world market for low-grade, mass-consumed coffee. The transfer of some of the profits gained in this trade to the study of productivity offered a means of defending this latest hard-won market, and of breaking out at last from the pattern of periodic defeat and stagnation.²

The Campinas institute was founded primarily in response to an impending labor crisis. Plantation crops were still largely tended by slaves, since planters had continued to import Africans even after independence. But the British had forcibly cut off the traffic in 1850; thereafter, since the slave population in Brazil tended to experience negative natural increase, the plantations exploited an aging and shrinking work force. Pressures from the slaves themselves, and from allies among the free population, had already led to measures for gradual abolition. Because the coffee planters had been unable, or unwilling, to induce free Brazilian laborers to tend the planters’ hundreds of millions of trees, the prospect of final abolition threatened the plantations with bankruptcy and dismemberment.

Labor abandonment was not the only fear of the coffee planters at that time. They confronted another potentially terminal hazard, that of soil exhaustion. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, coffee estates had been carved out of the virgin semitropical forests surrounding Rio de Janeiro. The forest was burned, thereby incorporating its nutrients into the soil as ashes. Coffee seedlings were planted after the holocaust, nourished by the ashes and the underlying humus. No further fertilization was provided during the rest of the trees’ life cycle. In some cases, this initial complement of nutrients sustained moderate productivity for 20 years or more. But yields fell considerably short of their biological potential and often dropped below rates worth harvesting well before 20 years had passed. Furthermore, the coffee tree was not suited to flat, moist bottomlands, but had to be sited on the impossibly steep flanks of the well-named “half-oranges” that dominate the interior of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. In a few years, the resulting erosion carried off the materials that the primary forest had stored up over millenia.³

An inherently unstable agricultural regime resulted in a plantation aristocracy without patrimony. Its members were in continual decadence, often reduced, after a single generation on the land, to begging for sinecures in government offices. Despite their airs of superiority, the planters were hardly less itinerant than their neighbors, the rural underclass who occupied the poor soils on the margins of the estates, engaged in slash-and-burn farming. Even if a wage labor force could be attracted to the estates, therefore, the relief was likely to be only temporary, before workers and planters alike would be submerged in penury.

At that critical juncture in the trajectory of the planter class, history records a breath-taking rescue. By 1888, coffee cultivation, in decline in the Rio district, was spreading to a new and fertile zone of production in the interior of the neighboring province of São Paulo. There, the planters, with high profits from groves still in the first bloom of productivity, had been able to buy away slaves from the decadent regions and to experiment with free labor imported from Europe. Just when slavery was collapsing, these planters convinced themselves of the need for state intervention, to socialize the cost of imported workers. Government-paid passage for immigrants was successful beyond the planters’ wildest dreams: 30,000 Italian peasants arrived in 1887, and 90,000 the following year. Although the planters were gratified, at least some of them understood that in order to retain free workers, and maintain control over the best lands in the face of the potential competition that the newcomers represented, they would have to improve productivity on their plantations.⁴

The installation of immigrant labor was thus related to the other question, that of the long-term viability of coffee planting on virgin forest soils. Although the shift of locale to São Paulo had staved off collapse, the abandoned countryside of the Rio zone was, for Paulista planters, an omen. One could travel for hours through the Paraíba Valley, reported one foreign observer, past naked hills, “mournful relics of coffee plantations once so splendid that they might almost have been said to bear gold.” The leaders of the provincial government of São Paulo had to consider, further, that even the new zone of production was finite in extent, and that once all of its primary forest had been burned and planted, coffee would collapse and so would the state’s revenues.⁵

It therefore occurred to one of the most energetic and far-sighted members of the Paulista coffee bourgeoisie, Antônio da Silva Prado, then serving as minister of agriculture in the imperial government, to request legislation to fund an agricultural research station, to be located in São Paulo. Prado was also a principal architect of the abolition law and of subsidized immigration and the most important director of the Paulista railway. Thus, he was a central figure in the metamorphosis of São Paulo from the condition of a frontier backwater, “vegetating in the mediocrity of isolation,” to that of the country’s productive heartland. The legislation authorizing this first research center was passed in September 1885.⁶

Prado’s model was the German network of agricultural research stations, the first of which had been founded just 24 years before. Prado’s successor in the ministry, another Paulista, Rodrigo Augusto da Silva, therefore ordered the Brazilian legation in Berlin to engage an agronomist to head the new center. A distinguished professor of agriculture at the University of Berlin recommended Franz Wilhelm Dafert. Dafert, Austrian-born, was only 24 years old, but already held a doctorate in agricultural chemistry from the University of Giessen. He had been employed by the central research station at Munich, and had received swift promotion to first assistant at the Royal Academy of Agriculture of Poppelsdorf, at Bonn University, where he published a text on soil science. The offer of the Brazilian government came to him along with two others, a university professorship at Erlangen and the directorship of the wine-grape research station at Geisenheim am Rhein. One might wonder what prompted Dafert’s decision to come to Brazil. Youthful adventurousness, perhaps, yet he was to display, from the moment of his arrival, a maturity, decisiveness, and sense of mission that would have been remarkable in a person twice his age.⁷

Dafert went to a country almost entirely lacking a scientific or technical infrastructure. The few public institutions were mainly survivors of the intense investigation of colonial resources sponsored by the Portuguese crown when in exile in Brazil from 1807 to 1821. They were underfunded and largely unappreciated by the official elite and the planter class of the Rio de Janeiro zone. Many foreign scientific expeditions had visited Brazil, but they had had little impact on local activities, and few had been designed to do so. Before Dafert’s arrival, no experimental agricultural research appears to have been carried out in Brazil. Nor were there more than a very few members of the planter class who engaged in empirical “improvement” trials on their estates or followed scientific developments in Europe. In this regard, the contrast with the rural social environment of nineteenth-century eastern United States, as described by Margaret Rossiter, could not have been more stark. The only studies of Brazilian coffee available for consultation were a handful of planters’ manuals, based on customary practice, and the field reports of Louis Couty, a French economic biologist, and C. F. van Delden Laërne, a Dutch coffee specialist.⁸

The directing elite of the Paulista bourgeoisie, however, was prepared to enlist European science and technology in support of a more advanced productive structure. A Geographical and Geological Commission had been created the year before to map the still-unoccupied frontier, in part a sign of the planters’ anxiety over the true extent of soils remaining for future speculation. A botanical garden, for the introduction of exotic economic species, was attached to this agency. A Sanitary Service would be set up in 1892, with associated analytical and vaccine-producing laboratories, in order to offer proof to potential immigrants of the state’s concern for their health. Plans for agricultural education were soon made concrete, with the funding, in 1892, of a middle-level agricultural school at Piracicaba and, in 1894, of a university-level agricultural engineering program at the new Polytechnic School in the capital. In the latter year, a state museum of natural history was dedicated. Most of these new institutions were directed and staffed by European and North American expatriates. The contracting of Dafert was thus part of a broader program, in which state-funded institutions were to assist the growth and development of an export-oriented plantation economy.⁹

Upon his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, Dafert was invited by the imperial government to expound the advantages of agronomic stations. Their investigations, he explained, were based principally on plant chemistry. Their purpose was to maintain and increase yields in major crops, and to assist in the introduction of new ones that might liberate the country from dependence on foreign supplies. The station must be in a position to answer “with the greatest dispatch” all questions put to it by the government, the courts, agricultural associations, and other groups and individuals and therefore must collect a great deal of information. The lack of previous scientific studies might slow the station’s progress, but, he assured the minister, only in its first stages. He presented a bill for the establishment of the station: 48,000 milreis (U.S.$20,000), including his own salary of 6,240 milreis, payable in marks. At the time, this was the going rate for a first-class agricultural station: the same price tag had been attached to the first genuinely scientific agricultural center in the United States, founded at Geneva, New York, only five years before.¹⁰

Dafert was taken to the city of Campinas, a hundred kilometers inland from the city of São Paulo, and there he was shown a site presumed suitable for the new station. Campinas was the major railhead, a principal producer of coffee, endowed with a municipal gas supply that Dafert’s laboratories might tap, and sufficiently urban to accommodate a distinguished European scientist. Dafert accepted, though the grounds were too small for all the projects he envisioned. The station would have to operate 24 hours a day, he informed his hosts, therefore quarters for the director and staff had to be built on the grounds along with the laboratories and library. These were completed with great dispatch, and laboratory equipment and books were ordered. The staff consisted of Subdirector Adolfo Barbalho Uchôa Cavalcanti, trained as a civil engineer, and chemists Henri Potel and R. Bollinger. Later, an oenologist and a phytopathologist were added. Dafert brought his first phytopathologist all the way from Java, after reading a notice he had written on the coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix) then ravaging Southeast Asia, a good example of Dafert’s foresight and energy.

All this was accomplished just in time for a series of shocks that rocked the new organization before it had really begun. First, as Prado had expected and the Brazilian legation had no doubt predicted to Dafert, slavery was at last abolished. That crisis was already swirling in the countryside when Dafert arrived, and the mass abandonment of the plantations by the slaves appeared for a time about to become revolution. This fright was hardly over when Campinas was struck by the first of several yellow fever epidemics that, in that era before its causes were definitely known, provoked great confusion and hardship. For the next few years, Dafert and his staff regularly abandoned Campinas during the fever season. Then, in November 1889, a military coup in Rio de Janeiro overthrew the aging emperor, and Brazil was declared a republic. Dafert’s first report to the Ministry of Agriculture, in 1889, nevertheless declared the station installed and in condition to function regularly.¹¹

Dafert was, in fact, already surveying the broad conditions of Paulista agriculture. He had discovered that the best lands had been “swallowed up” by a small group of landlords, whose estates “surpassed [the territory] of many German principalities.” The plantation of the Dumonts, in Ribeirão Preto, where 1.2 million trees were planted, contained “groves so extensive that they are lost to the view, seeming, as one might say, a sea, an ocean of coffee trees.” Although plantations like this had been bought for as little as five shillings a hectare, newcomers could not now obtain lands in the coffee zone except through “family connections.” Dafert might also have noticed that planters were fairly often absentee owners, residing in the capital, sometimes owning several estates, and turning their management over to administrators. Indeed, the coffee business was generally a speculation, in which the appreciation in value was much more important than where or how coffee was planted. Clearly, however, it was this class that Dafert had been contracted to serve. Although Dafert’s sympathies evidently lay with the landowning class—he characterized abolition as the “shrewd pursuit of the labor transformation,” and thought Prado’s free immigration policy “audacious” —he was not entirely charmed by his clients. He was not receiving any significant assistance from local planters, whom he found “completely indifferent” to scientific agriculture.¹²

The planters, he reported in a German agricultural journal, formed a class dependent on the state for favors, lacked solidarity and therefore cooperative institutions, were given to grand gestures without forethought, and strove to get rich quick. All this he attributed to “economic immaturity.” The Paulista landowners were not to be compared to the Prussian Junkers, who spent their lives in public service, first as military officers and civil servants and then as managers of their own estates, duty-bound to feed their country. It would be difficult for Brazil, lacking strong competition and bellicose neighbors, to foster a class such as that. And yet, the German farmer had less need to become informed or to associate, since it was the role of the authoritarian government to determine what was necessary for agriculture. Farmers in a democratic society, on the other hand (Dafert was writing just a month after the proclamation of the republic), must defend their interests, since a republican government had no such paternalistic responsibility. Dafert evidently favored a corporative structure, in which credit unions, cooperatives, and farmers’ leagues might better manage farm affairs than could a central bureaucracy. But in Brazil he found no spirit of association as yet, only “fruitless particularism.”¹³

Though disappointed, Dafert was apparently ready to help prop up the plantations. While the Paulistas were “on a par with the North American in foolish self-regard concerning their wealth of resources, progress, and achievements,” he sniffed, “it must he acknowledged that as farmers they are more energetic and capable than their brothers in neighboring provinces.” Besides, the country was very short of capital resources, and a certain amount of time would have to elapse before its “natural development” would be achieved. While he agreed with Arthur Getúlio das Neves, a professor at the Polytechnic School, that the division of the plantations was “indispensable” to agricultural and social betterment, Dafert worried that, in the short run, the “sudden division of the large estates would entail more a danger than a utility.” He therefore preferred to believe that “the maturation of a strong smallholding sector” was “only a question of time.” At any rate, the dispossessed did not yet appear to “feel the impulse to become owners,” and thus “no one expected a struggle to ensue” over this issue like that which had surrounded abolition.¹⁴

The soils of São Paulo, Dafert discovered to his surprise, were not particularly fertile. Soil samples that he collected in the region of Campinas, reputed to possess some of the most fertile in the state, showed a low level of all nutrients except nitrogen. Dafert quickly realized that abundant coffee harvests were possible in São Paulo only because the soils were initially fertilized with forest ash and humus and because the soils were extremely deep and porous, favoring development of the trees’ root systems. Luckily, the nutrient demands of the coffee tree, compared with European cereal crops, were modest. Wheat, for example, annually removed 29 kilograms per hectare, while coffee required only 3 kilograms. Subsistence crops such as corn and beans, on the other hand, quickly exhausted Paulista soils and had to be followed by bush fallow. Coffee, furthermore, was an extremely valuable crop—by weight, its value was ten times that of wheat. A crop that commanded so high a price was surely worth improving.¹⁵

The planters of São Paulo were practicing, Dafert observed, Raubbau, that is, predatory farming. They returned little or no fertilizer to the soil, but permitted it to become exhausted, at which point they moved on to new, forest-covered soils farther in the interior. In his first reports, Dafert pronounced this practice “economically rational.” It made no sense, he decided, to spend money on fertilizer out of “idealistic motives.” The planters’ descendants and the state economy would be better served through the most rapid possible accumulation of capital, which would later pay for the technical means to intensify cultivation when that became necessary—that is, when all the suitable primary forest lands had been exhausted.¹⁶

Dafert thought that the planters of the interior of São Paulo, unlike those of the Rio de Janeiro zone, might be successful in making that transition. In São Paulo, he remarked, apparently without irony,

Even though economically sound for the most part, Raubbau might be carried too far, however. Dafert observed practices that went beyond what was rational, even from the point of view of profit maximization. São Paulo’s Raubbau, he feared, “lacked, as paradoxical as it sounds, a rational character, true system. Even robbery can be carried out with or without thoroughness, dexterity, yes, if you will, even genius.”¹⁸

The practices that Dafert condemned, such as the interplanting of maize between coffee rows and the indiscriminate harvesting of ripe and unripe berries, were clearly expedients intended by the planters to attract and economize labor. Paulista planters had had to devise a system of coffee cultivation that might remain profitable despite the high cost of slave purchases. With the arrival of Italian immigrants, this system did not change, except perhaps for the worse. Although wages were kept low by state authorities, who sought to optimize, on behalf of the planters, the inflow of subsidized immigrants, planters also tried to minimize payments in cash by allowing interplanting—in effect, work-free subsistence. Those planters who, in addition, turned a blind eye to the delivery of unripe and overripe berries gained a further advantage in retaining workers. Given the difficulties of hiring at harvest time, planters provided yearly contracts, even though hoeing between seasons was not really a full-time occupation. The result was overstaffing, on all of the coffee plantations, including the largest and newest.¹⁹

Dafert was not entirely unaware of the centrality of the labor relationship to his investigations. It is to him we owe a remarkable observation on the contradiction between rational cultivation and the requirements of large-scale, competitive plantation agriculture. Dafert noticed that the Paulista planters seemed to have a passion for straight rows—the landscape of the São Paulo interior was coming to be disciplined into parallel files of coffee trees, rolling endlessly over the hilly countryside. It was Dafert’s opinion that this formation, which, he pointed out, induced erosion and should have been replaced by contour planting, had its origin in the necessity to control the work force. With curving rows, slaves only a few meters distant would be invisible to their overseers. For this reason, the planters had always had to carefully supervise the slave gangs that laid out the rows, since “the slaves were the declared enemies of straight lines.”²⁰

With abolition and the institution of piece work in hoeing and harvesting, it might be expected that contour planting would have been adopted, but that was only rarely the case. The slightly increased capital investment involved in contouring might have been somewhat responsible for the persistence of this baneful practice, but it also seems that planters had come to feel that a proper plantation, and a proper planter, should display to the world the straightest possible rows, as a sign of discipline and method. A onda verde, “the green wave,” exalted by the essayist Monteiro Lobato in 1920, was one of the most striking descriptive metaphors ever applied by the Paulistas to their landscape and is all the more noteworthy, considering the servile origins of the phenomenon and the damage it caused.²¹

Dafert found it remarkable, in view of the constant complaints of labor shortage, that labor was so ineffective. Paulista farm workers produced, in value, less than half that of their Prussian counterparts, and in biomass, less than one-twentieth. Yet Dafert did not presume that immigrant workers were more efficient than former slaves or mestizos, and he explicitly rejected the climatic and racial theories then regnant in Europe and widely accepted even in Brazil. Instead, he thought poor work methods were to blame, attributable to poor management.²²

The management practices of the planters were, perforce, what Dafert would have to influence if he was to justify the budget of his research center. But the transfer to Brazil of European scientific farming was a chancier proposition than the transfer of surveying, mapmaking, or inoculation, as Dafert was well aware. Crops, climates, and soils were different enough from Europe to suggest that agricultural science would have to be reinvented in the tropics. Although Brazilian planters were not much given to experimentation or even to the reading of scientific farm literature, some trials had been made of imported fertilizers and cultivators, but the results had not been promising. Van Delden Laërne had warned that Brazil yielded, for the professional agricultural specialist, “nothing but disappointment; the more grievous to the feelings of the theorist, as the results of the artless agriculture, based chiefly as it is on practical and local experience, are more advantageous perhaps than the principles of science would permit him to deem possible.” He thought Brazilian confidence in “the luxuriousness of nature in the tropics” to be “well-founded,” and the reason why European advisors were as yet little heeded.²³

Dafert admitted that it was “difficult to form a scientific opinion,” given the peculiarities of tropical conditions. His investigations would have to take “another path.” Nothing was as yet established concerning fundamental questions. What, for example, was the effect of uninterrupted growth on nutrient assimilation and on the circulation of nitrogen? These reflections obliged Dafert to propose an experimental program grander than he otherwise would have undertaken. It would have been irresponsible to offer advice to Paulista farmers merely on the basis of European experience. Nevertheless, he clearly intended that this experimentation would lead to the proposal of methods to enhance plantation profitability.²⁴

At this juncture in Dafert’s development as a tropical agricultural specialist, he suddenly fell ill and was obliged to depart for Europe. His continued illness resulted in his release and the promotion of Uchôa Cavalcanti. The station was then transferred to the control of the state of São Paulo and renamed, rather grandly, the Agronomic Institute, an obvious reference to the famous institute in Paris. Then, in 1891, under a new minister of agriculture, Dafert, by then recuperated, was brought hack to Brazil with the promise of the directorship of a new federal research station, at a location still undecided. He chose, instead, to accept the offer of the São Paulo secretary of agriculture to resume his position at Campinas. This chain of events may have been caused by administrative rivalries that accompanied the installation of the republic and by ensuing political realignments. The Geographical and Geological Commission and other government agencies were beset by similar difficulties, which, at repeated intervals thereafter, have presented a major obstacle to the development of scientific institutions in Brazil.²⁵

It has also been claimed that Dafert’s intention to carry out basic research was suspect in some government circles. Some officials, it is not clear who, may have preferred that the Campinas station be limited to carrying out soil and fertilizer analysis, running a demonstration farm, and advising on farm management. Experimentation, in this view, suggested impracticality and delay in realizing benefits from the station. It may be that this attitude stemmed less from immediatism than from an anxiety peculiar to the elite: they repeatedly imported the best of European experts—in commerce, the arts, and the military as well as in science—only to wonder nervously “what unhappy idea of us he may be forming, this recently arrived professional,” and to fear that the outsiders would not merely advise their hosts, but would eventually push them aside.²⁶

Yet Dafert’s views, during his convalescence, had grown closer to those of his employers. He now referred to Brazil as his “second homeland,” and proferred to the readership of the Revue d’Économie Politique a vision of a slave society unique in its moderation and absence of racial prejudice. He designated the early experiments in free labor a success, rather than a failure, and the process of abolition an economic inevitability, pacifically accepted by all sectors of society. The former slaves were persuaded, by the douceur of the Brazilian slave system, of the necessity to continue working on the plantations after their release from captivity. The republican coup was not a base betrayal of a benevolent monarch, but a necessary intervention to supplant an institution that rewarded mediocrity and failed to favor “economic development” (an impressively precocious use of the term, already redolent with ideological significance). The emperor, a “noble heart, but weak,” formed part of a system that included slavery and Raubbau, caused by isolation from competition, in short a “relâchement in all matters that demanded energy, a state of spirit the Brazilians called atraso.”²⁷

The division of the great estates no longer seemed to Dafert “merely a question of time.” He saw an organic unity in the wage and labor regime and “circumstances which affect property.” He now believed that the failure of various attempts to install smallholding had something to do with inherent “differences in nature and agriculture” that had given rise to “genres of economy to which government and the individual must conform.” Dafert stated, “It all appears thus as the result of a natural development, the consequence of a superior order of things, in which some see the eternal harmony of the good and the useful and others the inexorable linkage of causes.”²⁸

As for urban food supply, whose critical inadequacy resulted in extremely high food prices, Dafert saw that planters could not interest themselves in a kind of farming whose main input was necessarily labor. On the other hand, there were simply too few smallholders located near urban markets. Dafert noticed that the planters, “the dominant class of agricultural proprietors” in the state, “have no interest in favoring truck gardening, which will diminish the number of their workers on the plantations.” He therefore proposed to “remedy the evil in another way, that does not run counter to their interests.” He suggested that the planters, who were also speculators in urban real estate, might lease out their lots to the petty traders who “now live by selling stolen coffee or firewood,” thereby giving employment to one of the idle and dangerous classes of society.²⁹ As for the debate over the implantation of industry, a policy opposed by Paulista planters because they regarded it “artificial,” Dafert decided it would be a diversion of the country’s attention, and, if successful, would result in “intestinal struggles” as had occurred in Germany. Thus, Dafert displayed his conversion to the points of view of the planter class, and he devoted his energies to resolving some of the contradictions of economic renovation on behalf of the continuance of that class’s control of land and the state.³⁰

Dafert had become bolder, however, in defining his purposes at the institute. Now he proposed to develop and introduce an intensive model of coffee cultivation. Despite the evident economic advantage of predatory farming on primary forest soils, he had come to believe that scientific research could devise methods even more profitable than those that depended on the stored-up natural wealth of the forest. In particular, he thought that a better system could be devised to maintain the productivity of existing plantations.

This was indeed an issue over which planters expressed concern, and one which might win Dafert his mandate to carry out an expensive series of experiments. The plantation represented a large investment, in groves, housing, drying terraces, and roads—therefore it was rational to try to prolong its useful life. Slowing the rate of depreciation of the plantations would also lower the social costs of investment in railroads and other infrastructure that the rapidly expanding frontier made necessary.

Dafert was also able to perceive and articulate the linkage between high productivity of the plantations and the national interest, thus involving the institute with the desiderata of the central government: Brazil would be able to prevent the entrance of more competitors into the world market, a looming and dire possibility, only by intensifying coffee cultivation so as to remain the lowest-cost producer. This strategic proposal was more than a ploy to justify funding, it was an essential definition of economic independence and development.³¹

At Campinas, Uchôa Cavalcanti had been competently carrying forward experiments initiated by Dafert. The chemistry of the coffee plant was examined, in order to establish nutrient requirements throughout its stages of growth and to observe the results of applications of various kinds of fertilizer. As this experimental work began to demonstrate that coffee plants were indeed responsive to the addition of fertilizers, Dafert started to consider what forms of fertilization were economical. At that time, Brazil did not manufacture mineral or artificial fertilizers. The Geographic and Geological Commission had located a deposit of phosphates, which Dafert had repeatedly asked Congress to lease, as yet without result. The gasworks of Campinas, São Paulo, and other cities produced ammonia, which was not being captured for use in fertilizers. The state was exporting several hundred tons of animal bones each year. And other kinds of by-product fertilizers, such as castor oil cakes, might be commercialized as local production expanded.³²

Dafert assumed that, in the short run, mineral fertilizers would have to be imported, and this led him to suppose that, given high freight rates, it would not be economical to apply these fertilizers to coffee. In itself, this conclusion might well be taken as a sign of Dafert’s growing identification with the interests of his Brazilian employers, since, in Germany, research stations such as his would have close links with the chemical industry, and foreign specialists such as Dafert might well be presumed to act as agents of economic interests located in their homelands.

Instead, Dafert began to explore the practicality of applying natural fertilizers. Many Paulista planters were already using at least one form: they commonly returned the hulls of the coffee berries removed in their processing machines. This was virtually a cost-free practice, since the hulls were loaded into the same carts that brought the berries to the drying terraces and were spread under the trees by the same crews that were gathering the harvest. Dafert’s analysis of the hulls, however, showed that they contained only a third of the minerals removed from the groves at harvest, and still less of those lost annually through erosion.³³

Another source of natural fertilizer was abundantly at hand: cattle dung. Almost all planters kept large numbers of cattle; indeed, many expended large and commercially unjustifiable sums on their herds. Cattle were typically raised unstabled on unimproved pasture, quite unconnected to the estate’s farming activities. Dafert had observed one farm near Campinas, however, where manure was applied in the groves, apparently with good result. This was a mixed coffee and dairy estate that sold milk to the town market. Dafert’s early experiments showed increases in yields with applications of up to four kilograms of manure per tree, but optimal results were possible with one kilogram per tree in addition to coffee hulls. This amounted to one ton per one thousand trees (the number, on average, planted per hectare), a quantity he judged practical to gather annually from a single steer.³⁴

Therefore, in 1893, Dafert recommended that the coffee plantations of São Paulo be converted to a new, intensive model of cultivation. The coffee groves would be manured, and, to obtain that product, stables, feeding sheds, and curing troughs would be built. Plows and cultivators would be employed, and, to make their use practical, new groves would be planted on contours and with more space between rows. The interplanting of maize between coffee rows would be halted. Instead, maize, forage crops, and artificial pasture would be planted on separate, rotating fields. Each of these three fields would be plowed, manured, and harrowed. Dafert estimated the capital cost for these improvements at 240 milreis per 1,000 trees for an estate of 150,000 trees. At the time, 1,000 trees represented an investment of about 1,700 milreis, thus the new model implied an increase of about 15 percent.³⁵ If this new model increased yields by 20 percent, as Dafert conservatively estimated, the increased capital costs would be paid off “in a few years.” At then current coffee prices, they would have been settled, in fact, in less than two years. An additional one-third of one worker’s annual labor would be needed, per 1,000 trees, an amount which would have approximately doubled labor usage, at prevailing low levels of labor intensiveness.

The permanent staff of the plantations was underutilized between harvests, thus this was not necessarily an uneconomic proposal. Dafert estimated that a task which required two farm workers in Europe required three workers locally. Another aspect involved replacing ineffective workers with more effective ones, and the more general use of machines in place of hand labor, which Dafert pointed out as equally representing capital costs, in the form of advances, housing, animals, and subsistence plots. Although mechanical equipment was in general use in processing coffee, machinery was quite rare in the groves. Stump pullers were not widely used, for example, so that stumps rotted in place, occupying valuable space in the groves. Hoe cultivation was the rule on coffee plantations, despite its extreme inefficiency compared with the use of plows and harrows. It was true that the too close planting of the rows and maize interplanting were incompatible with their use, but future placement of trees could be modified, and the more efficient cultivation of maize in separate fields would abolish interplanting.³⁶

Dafert stated that this model represented “the general direction of the agricultural work of the [institute] since its foundation.” It was the product of a combination of observation and experiment and “sober reflection” on economic matters. Although it contained elements of European practice, it was suited to local conditions. Indeed, he insisted, “we must put aside foreign models and create forms organically linked to our nature and our development.” Above all, this was an integrated model: previous attempts at intensification had been piecemeal and therefore only partially successful.³⁷

If manure was to be used in the coffee groves, then cattle raising would have to be carried out more efficiently. Dafert saw beef and dairy production as economically promising, the only forms of enterprise worth the planters’ while, besides coffee. The breeding of improved cattle herds was beyond the institute’s capacities—in 1895, the state government authorized an animal breeding station to be attached to the institute, but the secretary of agriculture decided to locate it instead at the middle-level agricultural school at Piracicaba. The improvement of forage crops, however, was a clear necessity. The state imported nearly 13,000 tons of forage in 1898 at a cost of nearly 2,000,000 milreis (U.S.$300,000). The institute, therefore, introduced dozens of exotic forage species to improve cattle nutrition. When nearly all of these grasses proved disappointing, it began to study native and acclimated species, with a view to developing improved varieties. Curiously, or perhaps characteristically, Dafert perceived in the extreme variability in nutrient requirements of grasses another demonstration of the “pessimistic philosophy of the great thinker Nietzsche. Here are the ‘lords’ and ‘slaves,’ predestined by nature even in the peaceable flora. ”³⁸

Dafert carried out coffee trials on the institute’s grounds and on a few small plots of senescent trees made available by the owners of nearby plantations. These experiments, although insufficient to establish definitively coffee plant growth under practical conditions, suggested potential increases in yield much greater than Dafert’s initial estimate. On one aging grove of 5,500 trees whose yield of 150 grams per tree was unremunerative, yields were brought above 1,000 grams per tree, for an outlay only 50 percent above customary expenses. On an experimental plot of 50 trees at the institute, monitored for 7 years, manured trees yielded twice as much as the controls. On another plot of 136 trees, yields were doubled with manure, and nearly tripled with manure and artificial fertilizer. Dafert felt certain that fertilized trees could be brought consistently to the range of 2,500 grams per tree—three times what was usual on virgin forest soils. The most promising local variety of coffee, “Bourbon,” undervalued because of its supposedly briefer productive life span, he found to be the most responsive to fertilization, which, in addition, extended its useful life. Dafert believed fertilization would also hasten maturity, smooth out the characteristic alternation of good and bad harvests, and lengthen productive life spans up to 50 years.³⁹

The peculiarities of the tropical environment were nevertheless a worrisome aspect of Dafert’s investigations. He discovered that animal manure was not a satisfactory replacement for the mechanical qualities of the original layer of humus and that it did not contribute much nitrogen because, in the warmer and more biologically active soils of São Paulo, it was too quickly mineralized. Dafert was therefore obliged to study curing techniques, and concluded that artificial nitrate fertilizer would, after all, be a worthwhile component of his model.

Dafert avidly collected the journals of research stations located elsewhere in the tropics, but there was as yet little coffee research with which to compare his own results. Important work in Ceylon had been abandoned when local plantations were struck by coffee rust. Research in Madagascar was as incipient as Dafert’s. Java had made some essays at breeding, but was overwhelmed by the problem of combatting rust. Dafert, therefore, although a relative beginner, was at the forefront of his field. The institute was visited occasionally by foreign specialists who commented respectfully on Dafert’s results. His brief and tentative final monograph on coffee planting was almost immediately translated into Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, and his Amsterdam publisher requested further monographs on coffee fertilization and drying.⁴⁰

The new model of coffee planting would have to be attempted on a fairly large scale, somewhere in São Paulo. This was beyond the means of the institute, even though its experimental fields were expanding. Thus, it would be necessary to persuade at least one “rich planter” to collaborate. Dafert intimated that this would not be easy: evidently, he had already been sounding out rich planters. “The objection,” he complained, that “‘none of this will work in Brazil’ is simply absurd and is all the more vague, considering the number of contrary examples, which every one of us can observe for himself.” For Brazilian planters, Dafert lamented, coffee was the árvore das patacas—the money tree; they had no conception of hard work, like that carried out on European farms. Nor did they manage their plantations as businesses. “Honorable exceptions apart,” Brazilian planters did not keep regular accounts: they could not say with certainty if they were making a profit. They did not divide their plantations into blocks, an elementary practice, therefore they could not carry out field trials or tell which groves were more or less productive. Although they were often so short of firewood that mechanical drying of the beans was out of the question, they did not manage their woodlots, and would have found the idea, Dafert lamented, “incomprehensible.”⁴¹

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that although the institute’s annual reports note, over the next few years, an increasing use of manures and fertilizers in São Paulo, there is no sign that any substantial new or existing groves of coffee were turned over to Dafert to be managed according to his model. How many planters were there in the state who were ready or able to take upon themselves the administrative tasks that such a complex system would entail?

The resistance of the Paulista coffee planters, precisely the group whose fortunes the institute was designed to maximize, to experimentation and intensification was ruinous to the realization of Dafert’s “indispensable” reforms. The obstacles, he insisted, were not technical, but “social.” Management of plantations would have to be improved. Both planters and workers had to be “called forth to harder but more productive and remunerative labor.”⁴²

Antônio Prado remained a partisan of Dafert’s work. At a planter’s convention held in 1896, he set out, quite strikingly, the true relationship between investment and productivity. Chiding the delegates for their failure to discuss fertilizers, machines, and animals, he stated that when the planters turned themselves and their heirs into cultivators, and not mere exploiters, of the land, living on it and not abandoning it to inept or dishonest managers, then credit and workers would appear without effort. It was not a lack of capital that hindered increased productivity, but a lack of productivity that discouraged investment. The delegates were respectful, but unconvinced.⁴³

Bernardino de Campos, a Paulista who, as minister of agriculture, desired higher agricultural productivity as a means of increasing revenues and reducing subsidies, saw the Campinas institute as a model of its kind, and shared Dafert’s concern over the lack of technical knowledge among planters “and their heirs.” Campos proposed a series of reforms, including the expansion of agricultural schools. The fate of the agronomic program at the São Paulo Polytechnical School demonstrated, however, the scant interest of planters in scientific farming. It was finally closed in 1910 for lack of students, having graduated only 23 agronomists in 16 years. A committee reporting to a state congress on agricultural schooling regarded planters’ attitudes as the reason for the program’s failure: graduates were not hired, because “our planters reject the agronomist as a visionary.” By contrast, Pereira Barreto reported, the Japanese government had been sending three hundred students a year to European agricultural institutes. The middle-level agricultural school at Piracicaba, for a brief period under the institute’s control, was foundering for lack of a budget. Dafert agreed that schools were necessary, but he believed that middle-level schooling would also attract few students, “as long as the management of estates is reputed to be one of the easiest although most unpleasant of employments.” Dafert thought that planters’ sons might spend a year or so in such schools, at most. As for lower-level schools, farm workers would never send their children, unless the state enforced its compulsory schooling law.⁴⁴

São Paulo planters were growing still less inclined to pay attention to Dafert’s proposals. Their success in attracting immigrant laborers, and the euphoria associated with the expansionist economic policies of the republican government, had induced an orgy of coffee planting—the area had doubled, to 600,000 hectares. The market was increasingly unable to absorb the surplus, and prices were softening. The 1896 agricultural congress dealt almost exclusively with two issues symptomatic of their reaction to the growing crisis: the means of increasing farm credit and the advisability of laws that would, in effect, have reduced plantation workers to the status of peons. Neither issue was resolved. Credit became increasingly tight, and free contract was not further impaired, for fear that the Italians would choose to emigrate instead to Argentina.⁴⁵

As prices fell, the trick was, as Dafert put it, to produce billig und schlecht (“cheaply and badly”), delaying payments of bills and wages, reducing piecework to one or two hoeings, and making a single pass through the groves at harvest. If credit was unavailable, capital to build stables and buy plows and harvesters was out of the question. Dafert’s work was clearly at an impasse. Coffee production could not be abandoned for another export crop, since nothing as promising was at hand and too much was already invested in the groves and terraces. Nor was diversification, to satisfy the internal market, a viable alternative—the domestic market was too limited to support a plantation sector. Dafert thought that at some point in the future coffee would be restored to its former prosperity, but only after a long travail, during which land values would fall even further. The survivors of this great shake-out, he prognosticated, would be those most receptive to expert advice, those most aware that “farming is a business that is supposed to yield a profit.” These more calculating planters might well be foreigners, since foreign capital would accelerate agricultural reforms and distressed properties were already available at bargain prices.⁴⁶

Dafert decided, however, not to wait for this desirable dénouement. In 1898, he returned to Europe, to take up the directorship of the Imperial Agricultural Research Station at Vienna. Thereafter, he troubled himself no more about the “noble Rubiaceae” but spent the rest of his career as head of the Vienna station, one of Europe’s most prestigious, earning consultantships, numerous scientific honors, and a knighthood.

Uchôa Cavalcanti once again took over the institute, but soon fell ill and was replaced by Gustavo D’Utra. The latter, although a former director of the agricultural school of the state of Bahia, appears to have been uninterested in furthering a comprehensive model of coffee growing. Once again, the institute was accused of excessive concern with questions of merely scientific interest, and D’Utra himself expressed his intention to turn it into “a more modest establishment,” where “processes of cultivation would be perfected.” This implied criticism of Dafert’s program was entirely unjustified and tendentious, considering his central concern with coffee productivity, as well as his maintenance of a number of projects designed to reach the rural public: the publication of farmers’ bulletins, the establishment of model farms on state agricultural colonies, the distribution of seeds, and the availability of its laboratories for soil and fertilizer analyses and the diagnosis of plant diseases.⁴⁷

The new orientation of the institute was made official in a state decree in 1899. For the next 25 years, little experimental work appears to have been carried on at Campinas. From 1904 to 1908, Secretary of Agriculture Carlos Botelho expanded state assistance to farmers, in response to the deepening crisis of coffee overproduction. More was spent on middle-level agricultural schooling, agricultural statistics, publications, expositions, and a small measure of rural extension. But Paulista coffee planters put their hopes on none of this. They demanded and got price supports, the so-called Valorization of 1906, that freed them, temporarily, from the discipline of the market. The shake-out of unproductive estates was thereby put off, and so was the shift to scientific coffee cultivation.

The reforming Botelho was not greatly interested in basic agricultural research; however, when the directorship of the institute again fell vacant in 1906, he did consult Dafert in finding a successor. Unfortunately, the scientist chosen, Max Passon, of the Agricultural Institute of Paris, also became ill and returned to France within a year. Campinas was then allowed to pass through a long rudderless period. Lacking any clear research direction or mandate, it also lacked strong leadership. In 1923, the appearance in São Paulo of the African coffee borer (Hypothenemus hampii) was blamed, unjustly, on an importation by the institute, and its director was dismissed. Dafert was invited to return to Campinas, but he chose to end his career in Vienna.⁴⁸

São Paulo clearly should have taken the world lead in coffee research, since it was the world’s leading coffee producer. As advanced as the Dutch researchers of Java and Sumatra were in rubber and other tropical crops, they could not play that role for coffee, given the handicaps of coffee rust and dependence on a semiservile labor force. It is remarkable that the government of São Paulo did, in fact, invest so early in agricultural research. On the other hand, its failure to understand the potentialities of this investment, especially in regard to the study of its major export crop, contributed to the state’s delay in achieving economic development.⁴⁹

Dafert’s inability to convince the state of the need to intensify coffee production may well have been partly a result of his emigré status, no matter how well acclimated he felt himself. The much greater political impact achieved by Brazilian public health scientists, for example, all of whom were native-born, suggests as much. In the absence of a large cadre of professionally organized scientists, such as that possessed at the time by the United States, where intensive lobbying by agricultural schools led to the Hatch Act of 1887, a foreign specialist was excessively exposed. The unfortunate fate of the North American Orville Derby, first director of the Geographical and Geological Commission, illustrates the point. His failure to persuade the authorities of the correctness of his research direction is said to have been a factor in his suicide. It little availed Dafert that his work was bringing international renown to the institute; indeed the fact that its Relatorio was avidly read by foreign specialists was a reason given by the state secretary of agriculture in 1897 to suspend its publication.⁵⁰

Dafert’s model may well have suffered not only from his inability to engage the imagination of skeptical and improvident planters, but also from his failure to consider how it might have been made attractive to the existing or potential work force. Although Dafert seemed to realize that the soil was being mined not only because Raubbau provided easy and certain profits to the owner, but also because the workers, who had no stake in the land, preferred it so, he did not take this problem into consideration. Because wages on piecework encouraged hasty and halfhearted cultivation, and interplanting of maize provided abundant subsistence with minimal labor, Dafert’s new model ought to have contained a formula for sharing the gains in productivity that would have rendered this mindless waste of labor power less attractive. Perhaps such an adjustment was implicit in his model, or perhaps he thought better of making it explicit, given the mind-set of the planters, whom he had come to know too well.

Had Dafert not unreservedly accepted plantations as the inevitable framework of coffee production, he might have devised, as an alternative framework, methods of coffee cultivation suitable to smallholdings. Smallholders were immune to labor shortages, and might well have recognized more clearly the necessity of preserving soil fertility. In other countries, coffee was a smallholder’s crop, as it was also in Brazil in the state of Espírito Santo. But even if Dafert had envisioned smallholdings as the logical successor of plantations in the production of coffee, and not simply their complement in the production of garden crops, it is unlikely that he would have, from the precarious vantage point of the institute, proposed the transformation of the social and agrarian structure of São Paulo.

Dafert’s coffee analyses and experiments were still being reprinted and cited in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s. The institute founded by Dafert at length regained its influence, and went on to perform extremely important work in coffee and other crops. In the 1930s, it initiated a program of coffee selection and breeding whose results finally began to find application on the plantations in the early 1960s.⁵¹

One wishes, nevertheless, that Dafert had had a more receptive or perhaps a different clientele, and wonders what might have been achieved had the momentum not been lost. Dafert offers a remarkable window on the operations of São Paulo plantations. Evidently a well-wisher of the plantations and the social structure they held together, he resided in the state long enough to observe them and understand them well. That he was a competent specialist in his field may be seen from his reintegration, upon his return to Europe, into the highest level of its agronomic science community. His witness, therefore, to a productive structure that lacked the capacity to experiment and incorporate new techniques, apparently largely in order to economize managerial inputs, must be taken seriously. The miraculous expansion of Paulista coffee seems to have depended almost entirely on natural comparative advantage and very little on the skill of the planters. As Dafert remarked, citing another coffee specialist, Lester Arnold, “In South America, nature does everything she can for coffee and man does as little as possible.” If Dafert’s model had been adopted at a few plantations, it could have been further modified in practice. Since it was never put to the test, it cannot be known how effective it might have been; but that is not important. What is important is that Dafert lost hope of its adoption.⁵²

Eventually, the experimental model represented by the institute at Campinas did take hold, and São Paulo agriculture did begin to experience a shift to higher productivity, but only as virgin forest soils were finally exhausted. That was not soon enough, considering how much of the stock of natural resources and how much capital and labor power had been squandered in the intervening 60 years and how largely the Brazilian dominance of the coffee market had been eroded. Dafert’s recommendations were relevant not only to the profitability of the plantations, but to regional economic and social development. Had they been tried, would these transformations not have been earlier, more rapid, and more complete?