Kilometer 47

On the campus of Brazil's Rural University last week, the atmosphere was anything but collegiate. In black cassocks and brown robes, 41 priests and monks said their prayers at improvised altars in the dormitory halls, then went on to lectures and field demonstrations on crop rotation, irrigation and rural sanitation. What they learned in their month's stay would be passed along with their sermons and ministrations at outposts in 16 Brazilian states. The course was part of the university's effort to teach Brazil its biggest lesson: how to grow its own food.

If only 4% of its land were properly cultivated, Brazil could feed itself. With less than 2% under erratic cultivation, the country last year had to spend nearly $200 million on food imports (chiefly wheat), a needless drain on its foreign-exchange balance. It was just such a lopsided condition that prompted Fernando Costa, minister of agriculture under Dictator Getulio Vargas, to launch the university project in 1941. Shrewdly wangling government funds a little at a time, Costa built the core of a $6,000,000 farm school that is now a model of its kind.

Stucco on the Lawn. Called Kilometer 47 (because of its distance from Rio), the school spreads over 4,900 acres straddling the road to Sao Paulo. Its main buildings (yellowish stucco and red tile roofs) are set on spacious lawns landscaped with pools, palms and gravel driveways.

In the school's airy halls, white tiled laboratories and neatly planted fields, the faculty of 35, some U.S.-trained, conduct 64 courses covering everything from general farming to veterinary medicine and postgraduate research in genetics. Regular students, currently numbering 277 (including six well-chaperoned girls), pay only 220 cruzeiros ($12.32) a year for tuition, twelve cruzeiros (65-c-) a day for food. The ministry of agriculture makes up the deficit ($356,840 last year).

Stake in the Future. Kilometer 47's most ardent booster, Cornell-trained Dr. Alvaro Fagundes, director of Brazil's agricultural research, is well aware that the school's policy of refusing to compromise its high standards has some drawbacks. The cost of operation is high, entrance examinations extremely stiff, the student body relatively small. But Fagundes also knows that, in any case, Kilometer 47 can not do the job alone. A basic problem for the government is to reverse the drift of the population toward the industrial coast. And even when the hinterlands are manned and producing, new transportation systems must be built to get the produce to market.

Such major changes might take years. Meanwhile, the continuing goal of Fagundes and his colleagues is to make sure that the nation's eventual agricultural rebuilding will have a solid foundation.

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