Coffee Is Not Forever. Stuart McCook

By 1873 at the latest, Liberian coffee had been introduced in Ceylon.³⁶ Coffee planters there hoped that the plant’s broad and thick leaves would be better able than arabica’s to resist attacks of the rust. In 1875–76, some coffee planters from Ceylon traveled directly to Liberia to observe how the coffee plant was being cultivated there, and to collect seeds for themselves. This movement of live plants, seeds, and soil in Wardian cases could have hastened the spread of the rust, although most commentators argue (compellingly) that any crop diseases carried in the cases would have likely made themselves apparent during the voyage itself.

      Introducing the plant to Ceylon was just the beginning; farmers also had to determine how well it performed in the field. The initial trials were discouraging: “The Wardian cases had scarcely been opened,” noted one report, “when the Liberian plants were attacked by the prevalent plague, Hemileia vastatrix.” Undaunted, farmers continued to experiment with the plant and discovered that if the young plants were given proper care, “after 18 months or two years, they seem to be strong enough to withstand the disease and become healthy trees.”³⁷ And even if Liberian coffee plants were susceptible to H. vastatrix, they suffered less than arabica. They were not defoliated to the same extent, and “the greater part of the leaf area is left intact and it is enabled in spite of the leaf disease to discharge its functions as an essential part in the economy of the plant.”³⁸ By 1877, on some lowland coffee farms Liberian coffee produced as much as 2 tons per acre.

      Even so, however, the crop faced other challenges. The fruit of Liberian coffee had a thicker skin than arabica coffee, so planters had to get special depulping machinery to process it. And there were also broader challenges with the market; Liberian beans had a different flavor from the arabica coffee that traders and consumers were then used to. The market for Liberian coffee remained uncertain through the 1870s, although global demand for coffee was expanding quickly enough that Liberian coffee usually found buyers.³⁹ In the end, in spite of continued advocacy from its many boosters, Liberian coffee remained little more than an experimental crop. European planters and Sinhalese smallholders alike showed little interest in Liberian coffee. In 1878, at the height of the coffee boom, only about 440 acres of Liberian coffee were under cultivation in Ceylon.⁴⁰

      Still, in spite of the rust outbreak, owners of coffee estates remained generally optimistic about their crop through the 1870s. The outbreak coincided with a global spike in coffee prices after 1873, which for several years more than offset the losses in production. Between 1875 and 1881, the price for Ceylon plantation coffee fluctuated between 100 and 107 shillings per hundredweight, almost double what it had been a decade before. In 1877, the best year ever for Ceylon coffee planters, the total value of Ceylon plantation coffee exports exceeded £4,600,000. Profits increased even as production declined. In 1874, for example, when exports were 30 percent lower than they had been in 1870, the total value of coffee exports was 17 percent greater.⁴¹ “This great access of value to [one’s] returns,” wrote the Ferguson brothers, “more than sufficed to compensate the Ceylon planter for any diminution of his crop.”⁴² In fact, the high prices triggered a land rush; between 1869 and 1879—as the rust was wreaking havoc on coffee farms—some 100,000 acres of new coffee estates were brought into production, supported enthusiastically by Ceylon’s government. Even in the face of such losses, the planters continued to be optimistic. In short, as Thwaites observed, the planters were confident in the fact “there is little, if any, diminution in the anxiety to invest in the cultivation of coffee.”⁴³

      The New Botany and the Origins of Coffee Rust Science

      Estate coffee remained profitable though the 1870s, but by the end of the decade, planters began to express some concern. Total production declined steadily during the trough years of each biennial cycle. The editors of Ceylon’s Planting Directory predicted (accurately) that the coffee harvest of 1878 would be “less by 40% than that of 1869, although the area cultivated has increased to nearly 100,000 acres since that time.”⁴⁴ In 1879, which should have been a peak year in the biennial cycle, production was 170,000 hundredweight (about 8,600 metric tons) lower than the previous peak year. Planters finally began to panic. They asked the colonial government to hire a scientist who would devote himself exclusively to studying the epidemic. The planter G. A. Talbot wrote that the planters needed “a scientific man to make what researches he can and to give us information from a scientific point of view, so as to help us carry on the experiments. From a practical point of view we know our business, but from a scientific point of view we can get valuable assistance, by investigations with the microscope for instance.”⁴⁵ Talbot’s reference to a microscope is significant. Scientists had, of course, used microscopes to study the coffee rust since it was first reported in 1869. But the scientists who had done so—Berkeley and Broome, principally—lived and worked in England. Their research was important, but they didn’t work on living plant material and therefore could only see part of the fungus’s life cycle. Talbot was asking for a scientist who could bring the techniques of the laboratory—scientific instruments and experimental protocols—to study living coffee rust in the field.⁴⁶ They expected, or hoped, that this innovative kind of fieldwork would uncover some means to control the disease.

      The coffee rust outbreak had, in fact, coincided with important innovations in botanical research, known in the English-speaking world as the “new botany.” The new botany could equally well have been coined the “German botany” since the discipline was largely developed in German institutions (just as Liebig’s agricultural chemistry had been) and then taken by eager students to the rest of the world.⁴⁷ Practitioners of the new botany emphasized the study of living plants, in contrast to traditional botany, whose practitioners usually worked with dried herbarium specimens. The new botany emphasized studying the life cycle of plants, both in the laboratory and in the field. The emergent discipline of phytopathology—the study of plant diseases—built on the methodologies and approaches of the new botany. In the 1840s and 1850s, German naturalist Anton de Bary conducted pioneering research on crop diseases, particularly on the potato blight and the rusts and smuts of wheat. Through meticulous research in the laboratory and the field, he reconstructed the entire life cycle of fungi, from spores to mature organisms. He cultivated spores in the laboratory and on plants, and he tried to reproduce disease by systematically inoculating healthy plants with fungal spores. He produced convincing evidence that the fungi were independent organisms, that they had a life cycle, and that they were the cause of plant diseases rather than the consequence. De Bary’s approach offered a new way of understanding the coffee rust.⁴⁸

      In 1879, Ceylon’s planters enlisted the colony’s government to hire a scientist to study the rust. William Thiselton-Dyer, the assistant director at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, recommended one of his former students, a young biologist named Daniel Morris. Thiselton-Dyer had previously trained Morris in the techniques of the new botany at the Normal School of Science in London. Morris had been in Ceylon since 1877 as an assistant at the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. Using de Bary’s techniques, Morris carefully studied the rust in the field and reconstructed the fungus’s life history. He concluded that the rust had an external “filamentous” stage that lasted several months. He argued that attempts to control the fungus should focus on this external stage because the rust would be exposed and amenable to chemical control.⁴⁹ Morris worked directly with the coffee farmers in ways that the other scientists at Peradeniya had never done. He enlisted the help of coffee planters to conduct experimental sprayings of working coffee farms in the Dimbula district using “some of the specifics that have proved so successful in the treatment of the hop and vine mildew.” The sprays included mixtures of sulfur, including black sulfur, flowers of sulfur, sulfur and coral lime, and Grison’s mixture (sulfur and slaked lime). Morris found that a “mixture of sulphur and lime dusted by hand onto the tree has been found, by experiment, to be the most suitable remedy,” at a cost of 16.5 rupees per acre for materials.⁵⁰ Although the trials lasted just a single season, the preliminary results seemed to satisfy the planters.⁵¹

      Morris’s decision to involve planters paid institutional and political dividends. Before his arrival, coffee planters had doubted whether botany had anything useful to offer them. Thwaites had not done any experimental work on the rust and had offered planters little hope. Morris quickly