The new coffee frontiers

São Paulo - The first coffee plants in Brazil were planted in the northern state of Pará in the 1700s. The climate was favourable and the dimensions of the country contributed for cultivation of the product to spread rapidly. Coffee soon reached the southeastern states of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, São Paulo and Minas Gerais and the southern Paraná.
 
Economic crises, generated by the lack of land, eventually changed the flow of production, opening new routes. Coffee changed. In Minas Gerais, new areas started producing the commodity and now guarantee the state's lead in national coffee production. Regions with little tradition in coffee planting, like Western Bahia (in the Northeast) and Rondônia (in the North), have advanced in the coffee production ranking.

In Minas, new production areas started being explored in the mid 1980s, according to Rodrigo Pontes, agronomist and coordinator of the coffee area at the Agriculture and Livestock Federation of Minas Gerais (Faemg). The first great migration of coffee was to the Minas Gerais savannah. Farmers came, mainly, from the states of Paraná and São Paulo. "Many had lost their crops due to frosts. To this scenery was added the government of Minas Gerais' decision of expanding coffee plantations in the state and incentives were given to those who accepted the challenge," he explains.

The strategy worked out. Currently, the savannah answers to 18% of coffee production in the state of Minas - around 3.9 million bags a year. The crops are irrigated and the coffee of the savannah is considered a different product from that produced in other regions of the state, it has a chocolaty taste.

The Bovi family is one of the representatives of the coffee farmers who conquered the savannah. Their first crop was planted in the city of Marília, in São Paulo. With high production costs and the invasion of other farmers, the family migrated to the state of Paraná. It was the early 1980s. In the state of Paraná, the Bovi planted and saw their production grow. Then came a frost that that destroyed their crop. Many farmers gave up. The Bovi insisted. "My father looked for another area," explained Hemerson Bovi, who is in the third generation of the family.

In their travels, the Bovi arrived in Monte Carmelo, in the savannah. Cheap land that needed irrigation. The year was 1998, and the Bovi pulled up their sleeves and started planting again. They currently cultivate 200 hectares. Average production is between 40 and 50 bags per hectare - well above the national average of 17 bags per hectare. In the last crop, the family picked 7,000 bags. Good drinking coffee, the grain produced by the Bovi has already twice been among the 10 best coffee grains of the state, according to an evaluation by Italian company Illy.

Jequitinhonha

The newest frontier in Minas Gerais, explored for the plantation of coffee, is the area around the city of Capelinha, where a large part of the local production is found. Different from the savannah, in the region it is farmers from Minas Gerais who produce the coffee. "In southern Minas, there are areas that suffer due to low temperatures, and the land is more expensive. Therefore, many farmers purchased land in Jequitinhonha in recent years," stated Pontes. The area already answers to 8.4% of the coffee produced in the state and is expanding. The projects include training of producers and labour.

Bahia

Irrigation of crops is a factor that is bringing Bahia, in the NE, into the coffee farming club. The state is already the fourth largest coffee producer in the country, with 5.4% of production - having overtaken the state of Paraná in 2005, which was responsible for 5.3% of Brazilian coffee. The saga of Bahia began at the end of the 1980s, due to a daring initiative by the Angolan João Barata, who launched a project to plant one million coffee plants in the western region of the state. At the time, many people doubted the project. Persistent and with good references for this kind of farming, Barata worked on various viability studies and, in 1988, started operating the first irrigated sapling farms.

In the beginning, just 20 hectares were planted, 18 using the Catuaí variety and two with the Mundo Novo variety of coffee. In the first crop, in 1990, an average of 41 bags of Catuaí coffee were harvested per hectare. In the case of Novo Mundo coffee, the average was 29 bags per hectare. Catuaí was defined as the coffee that adapted best to the local conditions.

Currently the productivity of irrigated coffee in Western Bahia is around 55 bags per hectare. In the last crop, production of coffee in the region, all irrigated, covered an area of 14,000 hectares, to be maintained in this year's harvest. Last year a total of 770,000 bags were picked in western Bahia (the whole state picked 2.3 million bags).

For the next harvest, production is expected to be lower, around 471,000 bags, around 43 per hectares. "Various factors contributed to the reduction. Most of the plantations have already been cultivated for over six crops, and are aging. This increases the difference in biennial crops," explained Sérgio Pitt, vice president of the Association of Farmers and Irrigators of Bahia (Aiba).

According to him, also due to the age of the crops, many farmers are renewing their coffee farms through pruning. Thus, although the total area is still around 14,000 hectares, the effective area of production will be reduced to 11,000. These are necessary cultivation techniques and through them, production levels should be recovered in 2008.

Irrigated coffee of Bahia is exported, mainly to the United States, Canada and countries in Europe, like Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy.

From rubber to coffee

In the state of Rondônia, it is small farmers who sustain coffee production. The state is the second largest producer of conillon coffee, losing only to Espírito Santo, where production is ancient - starting in 1800. In the national ranking, Rondônia is already in the sixth place, responsible for 3.2% of the coffee produced.

According to Websten Cesário da Silva, an agronomist at the Rondônia state branch of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), the process of migration of coffee farmers to the region began in the 1970s and is similar to what took place in other regions of the country. "After successive losses in the southeast, producers came after a rich area for production. Most came from Espírito Santo, Paraná and Minas Gerais," he said. They arrived in the central region of Rondônia, mainly in the cities of Cacoal and Ouro Preto d'Oeste, and started planting, in general, in areas of degraded pasture. They brought knowledge and consolidated coffee growing in the region. Organizations like the Embrapa also started researching the soil in the region and developed species more adapted to it. The result showed: the 2005 crop, for example, was 1.7 million bags.

Silva, however, says that the growth in production is threatened by transport bottlenecks. Last year, a good year for coffee, production in Rondônia dropped to around 1.4 million bags. "The coffee has been processed in the state alone, as a large part of the routes through which the product could be transported are mud roads," he said. Coffee farming has also been losing space to cattle and soy farming.