SA PA ULO— ( OF FEE 



\ ll 



A branch of a Coffee Tree 



plantations in the nortli are still giving 150 arrobas but coffee culti- 

 vation is more and more moving northwards and it is Mr. Braga's 

 prognostication that in years to come it will finally settle on the 

 Parah3^ba river and then Sao Paulo will be turned into a " cemetery 

 of coffee plantations." This jwophecy, I suppose, is to hold good only 

 in case planters refuse to use chemical manures and thus restore the 

 exhausted soil. A coffee tree will bear quite 40 years and it will be 

 readily understood that after such a lapse of years the soil becomes 

 poor. How it is to be achieved that the 834,000,000 trees are to be 

 regularly manured, or even half this number, is too difttcult to imagine 

 with the present density of population. Coffee cultivation even now, 

 under ordinary conditions, requires considerably more labour than 

 cotton. 



Coffee has a fascination for the Paulista, but in view of the high 

 cotton yields in the State and the ever decreasing coffee yields one 

 cannot come to any other conclusion but that cotton will expand 

 here in the near future at the expense of coffee. Cotton is already 

 being cultivated amongst the coffee trees on many estates as a catch- 

 crop, the workpeople are therefore becoming conversant with its 

 method of cultivation. Moreover cotton would not suffer from the 



