Improving the Breed

On a government-owned farm in Guatemala one day last week, Dr. William Cowgill (rhymes with low bill) picked a heaping basketful of coffee cherries. The cherries came from one of the trees that Cowgill, as chief of the coffee section of the joint U.S.-Guatemalan agricultural development project, had carefully tended for nearly four years. When the cherries were beaten, washed, dried, scraped, and reduced to cafe en oro (the exportable bean), visiting coffee planters could hardly believe their eyes. From the same species of tree, Coffea arabica, they--and most other Latin American producers--had seldom harvested much more than a pound of beans per tree. Cowgill's yield: a whopping 14 Ibs.

When Cowgill started his Guatemalan researches in 1945, the world seemed to have a lot more coffee than it needed. But by last week all that had changed. In the last three months of 1949, coffee prices almost doubled. U.S. consumption had soared above prewar levels, and Latin America's output lagged behind. Cowgill thinks that the work he has been doing will help close the gap.

Most coffee planters--"there are no coffee growers," says Cowgill--plant the trees and leave the real production problems to their poorly paid help, who simply follow tradition. In Guatemala, the tradition was set about 50 years ago in a handbook written by an Englishman after a three-week tour of Central America. Its main recommendation to coffee planters: plenty of shade (from other taller trees) and 12-ft. spacing between the coffee trees. Though his experiments are not yet conclusive, Cowgill believes that the elimination of shade would increase production. His experiments also indicate that the number of coffee trees per acre, now about 350, could ultimately be increased to 850.

To boost the yield per tree, Cowgill applied techniques that growers of other major crops have used for years--selected breeding, crossbreeding and grafting. His advice to planters is simple: keep a production record on several trees and plant the seeds from the highest producers. His conservative estimate is that adoption of this procedure would triple production.

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