Birdseye Views of Far Lands

by James T. Nichols

In some parts of Brazil rice is cultivated quite extensively and it makes a cheap food. It is said that in one place a man from Louisiana is running an experimental rice farm showing the Brazilian farmers how to cultivate Japanese rice. Rather strange, isn't it, that United States farmers should be teaching the Brazilian farmers Japanese agriculture?

A peculiar thing about the land of Brazil is the absence of earth worms. In our country these worms improve the physical condition of the soil but there this lack is made up by the multiplied millions of ants that burrow down deep into the earth. In our country, too, the chemical changes of winter help prepare the soil for the coming crops, but in Brazil there is no winter season when the land "sleeps" and it does not seem to be necessary.

While in the great rubber industry of Brazil the trees grow and produce with but little if any cultivation, this is not true of the coffee trees. They have to be cultivated and carefully looked after. Insect pests that are so destructive to coffee trees in many countries, are almost absent in Brazil and this fact has not a little to do with making this the greatest coffee country in the world. In the state of Sao Paulo almost the entire energies of the people are absorbed in the coffee industry.

This state is a little larger than Colorado and is the most powerful state of the twenty that make up the United States of Brazil. The name of the capital is the same as that of the state and the city of Sao Paulo is about as large as Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is noted for its beauty and industry. The climate is delightful, always cool, but never freezing cold. With more than one hundred elementary schools besides numerous high schools and colleges it is perhaps the greatest educational center of the country. Near this city is the largest coffee plantation in the world. It contains something like eight million trees and takes about eight thousand people to run it. This one plantation produces twenty million pounds of coffee annually and there are thirty railroad stations upon it.

A well kept coffee tree is about twelve feet high when full grown. The leaves are a shiny green, a little like holly. The trees bloom in September and fill the air with fragrance. As the white blossoms fade the berries begin to form. May is the harvest time. Harvest hands come in large numbers as they do in Kansas or the Dakotas during the wheat harvest. Workmen are paid according to the amount they gather and some of them gather fifty pounds a day.

The coffee berries are first stripped from the tree then raked and piled into baskets. Next they are run through a machine that takes the bean out of the covering, then into tanks of water where they are thoroughly washed and then comes the drying process. It used to take weeks to get the coffee beans well dried and men had to watch and keep stirring the piles continually, but quite recently a new process was discovered by which they are dried by steam.

After the coffee beans are thoroughly dried they are run through rollers that break the skin covering and great ventilators blow the chaff away. Then the beans are poured into a gigantic sieve with different sized holes which are chutes in reality and from which endless streams of coffee graded according to size run into a large room. At each stream stand women who pick out imperfect or damaged grains. The coffee is then sacked and is ready for shipment. The ordinary bag of coffee weighs about one hundred and twenty pounds. Santo is the great coffee port and here can be seen ships from every civilized land taking on cargoes of coffee. If it is well kept coffee gets better with age, so it can be piled in great warehouses for months or even years and not deteriorate. Nearly a dozen million bags of coffee are shipped from Santo annually and as we are the greatest coffee drinkers in the world about half of the entire crop comes to us.

Formerly many of the coffee plantations were worked by slaves. Negroes were brought from South Africa, as they were brought to work in the cotton fields in the south in anti-slavery days. In the year 1888 Brazil freed her slaves and the sudden freeing of a half million slaves almost demoralized the coffee and sugar industries of the country. Many of these negroes thought that freedom meant that they would never have to work any more and they became loafers and often criminals. Of course thousands of them drifted to the great centers of population and Brazil has had and is still having her share of race troubles.

Many of the workers on the coffee plantations at present are Italians. They come in large numbers to work on these estates. Each family is given a certain number of trees to look after; sometimes a single family will take care of several thousand trees. They have to do a lot of hoeing and weeding. The soil is almost red and these workmen take on largely the color of the soil as their faces and clothes are stained with red dust and water. Families are furnished houses to live in and they live their own lives as if they were in their home country.