After seeing the drawings, Berkeley concluded that the fungus appeared to be a completely new species. “The most curious circumstance,” he observed, “is that amongst more than a thousand species of Fungi received from Ceylon, this does not occur.” The fungus looked like no other, and Berkeley concluded that “it is not only quite new, but with difficulty referable to any recognized section of the fungi.” Berkeley concluded it was not only a new species, but also an entirely new genus, which he baptized Hemileia (Latin for “half-smooth,” reflecting the shape of the spores). He named the species, aptly as it turned out, vastatrix—the Latin word for “devastator” or “destroyer.” His description and drawings of the new fungus were published in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, a leading publication on pure and applied botany, on November 6, 1869. Just six months after this fungus had been discovered in a remote corner of Ceylon, it had been classified and described in Europe. Its image was published and circulated in one of Europe’s leading botanical journals—warning farmers and scientists about this new disease just as “most wanted” posters alerted citizenry and law enforcement officers about fugitive criminals.20 Berkeley’s publication marked the beginning of scientific research into the coffee rust epidemic, but describing the fungus from dried spores was just a start.
As the epidemic in Ceylon became more severe, some of Britain’s leading scientists became alarmed. In February 1875, Joseph Hooker surveyed the world’s coffee farms to measure the extent of the rust. He sent a circular to all the world’s major centers of coffee cultivation.21 The circular described the nature of the rust infections and their impact on the coffee plants, then asked the local informants to report back to Kew if they had seen such a disease. By the end of 1875, responses had returned to Kew from informants as far afield as Jamaica, Brazil, Réunion, and the Dutch East Indies, all of whom answered in the negative. It appears that in mid-1875 the coffee rust was unknown anywhere beyond Ceylon and Southern India. The reports do, incidentally, indicate that coffee farms around the globe suffered from many local diseases and pests, but nothing on the scale of the leaf rust.22 In an article in The Gardeners’ Chronicle discussing the global rust survey, Hooker warned that “unless measures are taken to prevent the introduction of Coffee plants from infected countries into others at present free from it, [the rust] may be expected to spread eventually to wherever Coffee is cultivated.”23
Hooker also lucidly explained why plantation monocultures were inherently vulnerable to epidemics such as the rust. Wherever large concentrations of crop plants were found, Hooker argued, the conditions would be “extremely favourable for the rapid extension and development of parasitic plants and insects.” In the wild, these parasitic organisms did not cause much of a problem since they had “only native plants in small quantities to prey upon.” Hooker expected diseases such as the rust to become a regular feature of tropical agriculture, characterizing them as “one of the penalties which man must expect to pay for such an enormous disturbance of natural conditions as implied in replacing a tropical forest of the most varied and mixed vegetation by a plantation of a single economic plant.” The problem was not limited to tropical crops; he pointed to the potato blight, the phylloxera of the vine, and the potato beetle as comparable infestations in the temperate zones. Based on this fundamental vulnerability, he predicted that Ceylon’s coffee planters would have to bear “the constant loss of a certain percentage in every year, with occasionally the loss of an entire crop,” just as the potato farmers in Europe did once the potato blight had become endemic in their fields. Still, Hooker hoped that some measure of control would be possible in order to keep coffee production economically viable.24
Some coffee planters did not accept this kind of explanation. In retrospect, it is easy to characterize these planters as intellectually conservative, but at the time, the connections between the fungus and the decline in coffee production were not at all evident. Coffee production, especially estate coffee production, was volatile even without the rust. Intensively cultivated arabica farms follow a biennial production cycle, in which a year of high production is followed by a year of lower production. During high-bearing years, the trees devote so many resources to production that the next year they produce a much smaller crop. The coffee rust exacerbated this biennial cycle. Coffee trees that had been completely defoliated one year—often with the branches left dry, brittle, and seemingly dead—would recover the following year. In good years, coffee production remained high, although perhaps not as high as it would have been without the disease. In the off years, the defoliated trees produced even fewer cherries than they would have in disease-free off years. Production dropped by a quarter in 1869 and 1870 and then dropped precipitously over the next two years. Between 1873 and 1878, coffee production seemed to settle into the biennial cycle that planters were familiar with. During the peak years of the early 1870s, Ceylon produced about 950,000 hundredweight of coffee, just short of the pre-rust production. During the low-yielding years, it produced between 650,000 and 750,000 hundredweight. This stability, or seeming stability, may have given the planters the sense that they had reached some sort of equilibrium with the disease. But there were certainly still causes for concern. While the island’s total production had remained stable on average, the yield per acre had declined significantly. The total acreage under coffee cultivation actually increased by 50 percent between 1870 and 1878, from 185,000 acres to 275,000 acres.25
Planters did recognize a correlation between the fungus and the drops in production but did not necessarily see the fungus as the cause. Rather, they argued that the fungus and the drop in production were both the consequences of a deeper disease inside the plant. “The leaf disease is not the ‘disease’ but an effect arising upon and from a diseased condition already contracted by the coffee trees,” argued one planter. “Fungus, blight, mouldiness, appear only upon already diseased subjects. Wherefore surely we are less concerned as to inquiring into how the evil operates … than in ascertaining the cause of it.”26 The planters had no single theory to explain the disease; most invoked some sort of physiological or environmental explanation. Some argued that the disease was caused by a “poisoning of the juices” of the coffee tree. They suggested that the disease was the result of poor cultivation, inadequate manuring, or climatic disturbances. Some planters argued that the disease was just temporary and that sooner or later it would “wear itself out,” as earlier outbreaks of diseases and pests appear to have done.27 In the end, planters were primarily interested in finding a practical way to manage the disease, however it was caused.
Managing the Coffee Rust
Farmers fought back against the rust, both individually and collectively. Some planters thought that high cultivation could help control the rust and perhaps even cure it. High cultivation involved a holistic approach to farming. The planter Edmund Hull succinctly described it as “careful pruning, manuring, shade, where required, the entire suppression of weeds, [etc.].” He found “a great unanimity of opinion” among planters, who agreed that while the coffee rust might not be “altogether prevented by high cultivation, [the disease] may be at least checked by it.”28 The discourse of high cultivation had a strong moral undercurrent. Some European farmers used the concept to distinguish their farming practices from those of the—supposedly inferior—local farmers. In this view, any planter who failed to practice high cultivation, who neglected his farm, was letting his peers down—and also allowing the disease to spread.
Estate farmers tried a range of solutions, many of which drew on ideas and technologies imported from abroad. For example, one key component of high cultivation was manuring—the use of fertilizers. Coffee planters in Ceylon had been interested in fertilizers even before the coffee rust broke out. This was one area in which the planters had learned from scientific innovations and adopted science into their farming practice. The German chemist Justus von Liebig had revolutionized the fertilizer industry in the 1820s and 1830s. Liebig, a professor of chemistry at the University of Giessen, had developed the field of agricultural chemistry. His laboratory produced the earliest chemical fertilizers. Still, the scientists did not have a monopoly on the study of manures, and coffee planters used chemical and organic, local and imported
