The use of Strampelli’s early wheats in Portugal was advanced by a severe attack of stem rust—Puccinia graminis—in 1928, the year before the Wheat campaign started, with disastrous consequences for the year’s grain harvest.[55] Each of the Portuguese varieties used in the 1920s had a long development cycle, harvested only by mid June and thus exposed to both Puccinia attacks and dry hot eastern winds (Suão). It was with great enthusiasm that Portuguese farmers, particularly those of the large southern estates of Alentejo, began to cultivate their lands with Ardito, which combined resistance to lodging and rust with short cycles.[56]
The Italian elite races of wheat were not simply imported. As had happened in Italy with the use of Carlotta Strampelli in the Mezzogiorno, in Portugal there was quick disappointment with the promises of geneticists, for the imported varieties had been designed for very different conditions. In particular, Ardito and Mentana were bred to reveal their favorable yielding properties in the highly fertile areas of northern and central Italy, which had little in common with the semi-arid Alentejo region. It is thus no surprise that Câmara, whose family also owned a large wheat estate in Alentejo, in his effort to intensify wheat cultivation in Portugal during his years as head of the Wheat Campaign, conducted experiments on the best cultivation methods to profit from Strampelli’s varieties.[57] In trials started in 1928 at the Agronomy Institute, he subjected Ardito, Mentana, and Villa Glori to different culturing techniques, controlling processes and fertilizers’ doses in an effort to determine what methods would work best for Portuguese farmers.
To repeat, the circulation of geneticists’ artifacts was not an automatic procedure. It was the role of local scientists, Câmara among them, to adapt Italian varieties to Portuguese conditions, so that Strampelli’s Ardito or Mentana could circulate between Rieti and Alentejo. Breeding was also part of the transfer process. Instead of starting a hybridization program from scratch with no immediate results (for it was estimated that a 10 year period was necessary for the production of a new hybrid), Portuguese breeders’ first step was to concentrate on making pedigree selections of imported Italian wheats, a much quicker procedure.[58]
To undertake pedigree selections in pure lines, such as the Italian elite races, seems to ignore the basic fact that their stability of properties is due to their homozygotic constitution, condemning to failure any further selection. But Câmara, in his role as head of the Genetics Laboratory of the Lisbon Agronomy Institute, was highly critical of the generalized gesture among breeders of accusing farmers of believing in the myth of degeneracy of the wheats supplied by agricultural experiment stations. The observed decay of yield or resistance properties observed by farmers in their fields was rejected by many breeders as being the result of mixing different varieties in the process of selecting seeds instead of “cultivating authentic pure lines distributed by Breeding Stations.”[59] The heterozygotic plants in the fields, with properties varying over time, were supposedly the result of careless ignorant farmers’ not following the advice of experts. The point is that Câmara was very assertive in discarding the notion of “pure line” used by most breeders with backgrounds in genetics, stating bluntly the impossibility of producing homozygotic plants concerning any of the characters worked by breeders.[60] Resistance to pathologies, drought, or cold, or properties of precocity and productivity, “are never dependent on a single gene,” being a function instead of the combination of several genes, and are “inherited following the system of quantitative characters.”[61] Against breeders who claimed to have a methodology to identify homozygotic specimens in the field, as Strampelli did, Câmara offered the counterfactual of a property depending on twenty cumulative factors—far fewer than those usually affecting properties targeted by breeders. The desired homozygotic condition in all twenty factors would surface only after 1,099,511,627,776 plants. And that figure was calculated by “considering all factors acting the same way and in the same direction, ignoring expression inhibition interactions among factors.”
In fact, the possibility of cultivating Ardito in Alentejo was due exactly to the impurity of pure lines. In the first years after being introduced, its glumes were so loose and the percentage of seeds falling to the ground so high that it was considered unlikely ever to thrive in Portugal. But according to Câmara, “the instability of the Ardito lines allowed for a segregation of relatively important amplitude.”[62] By harvest time, much more grain was collected from spikes resistant to “natural threshing than from those bearing the undesired genetic condition. Selection was thus made in the direction favorable to agriculture.” The absurdity of the concept of absolutely stable lines was obvious. Locality was still crucial in genetic flows.
Elvas would be the place selected to install the breeding plots of the National Agricultural Experiment Station (Estação Agronómica Nacional), the new institution founded in 1936 and directed by Câmara after his work for the Wheat Campaign. A town located in the northeast of Alentejo, in the heart of the Portuguese wheat belt, Elvas has the driest climate in the country. Moreover, inside a 20-kilometer radius it possesses almost all the soil types of the wheat region. Such characteristics account for why seeds originating from Elvas had been traditionally praised for their good behavior in other environments. In fact, an extension post of the Ministry of Agriculture had been founded in 1926 in Elvas to take advantage of the area’s reputation as the place for the “tuning” of wheats.[63] Like Rieti, Elvas offered the perfect conditions both for breeding research and seed production. In 1937, a year after the founding of the EAN, the breeding department started its operations, occupying and expanding the facilities of the previous extension post.
The collections that constituted the obligatory starting point of the breeders’ work originated from the Central Agricultural Station (Estação Agrária Central)—the predecessor institution of the EAN—and from the Swedish plant-breeding station at Svalöf.[64] The Central Agricultural Station collection had about 8,000 samples of Portuguese landraces, some gathered by agricultural scientists surveying the country fields and some sent in by farmers. The Swedish collection, on the other hand, probably arrived at Elvas in the hands of D. R. Victória Pires, the agricultural scientist head of the breeding department of the EAN, who in 1934 held a scholarship granted by the Board of National Education for a stay in Svalöf.[65]
55
D. R. Victória Pires, “Trigos Precoces,”
56
António da Cunha Monteiro,
58
D. R. Victória Pires, “Os Trabalhos de Melhoramento de Plantas e a Lavoura do Trigo,”
59
António Câmara and Manuel Lorena, “A Influência do meio no enobrecimento das variedades culturais,”
60
António Câmara, “Conceito actual da degenerescência dos trigos,”
63
The Portuguese word is ‘afinar’, which, like English ‘tune’, is used mostly for mechanical devices. On the advantages of Elvas as an area for “wheat tuning” see D. R. Victória Pires, “Em busca de novas raças de plantas,”
64
The first breeding work undertaken in Portugal following the pure line methodology was started in 1901 and consisted in making selections of Portuguese wheat landraces. The Central Agricultural Station, after a classificatory work of Portuguese wheats made trough collecting material all over the country, produced and released several elite races in the first decades of the twentieth century, but in very limited amounts. See Luiz F. Leite Rio, “Estudos sobre a colecção de trigos da Estação de Melhoramento de Plantas. Dez anos de observação,”
65
Victória Pires would follow Câmara as director of the EAN from 1960 to 1973. On the breeding work at Svalöf, which exemplifies the work of many breeding stations around the world, see Staffan Müller-Wille, “Early Mendelism and the subversion of taxonomy: Epistemological obstacles as institutions,”