Agriculture

Agriculture is the oldest and most widespread industry in the Madeira archipelago, occupying some seventy-five per cent of its inhabitants. The arable land can scarcely exceed an area of 300 square kilometres, that is, 30,000 hectares. The uncultivated land, which includes the highest and most rugged ground, must cover an area of more than 200 square kilometres. Cultivation does not generally extend above 700 to 750 metres. The land lying immediately above that is reserved for gathering firewood, brushwood and broom, and also for rearing and grazing livestock, with the exception of cattle.

It is both interesting and useful to reproduce here what the distinguished Madeiran botanist Carlos Azevedo de Meneses wrote in one of his works on the distribution of plants according to the altitudes at which they can become acclimatised and thrive.

Four agricultural zones may be recognised in Madeira, corresponding to the four botanical zones into which the island is customarily divided. The first extends from the seashore up to 200 or 300 metres, the second up to 700 or 750 metres, the third up to 1,600 metres and the fourth up to 1,850 metres.

Sugar cane, the banana plant and cacti characterise the first zone, which, adopting Koppen’s classification, we may call subtropical. Besides these plants, however, it is also home to the vine, wheat, barley, maize, cabbages, turnips, the black or Guinea pumpkin, the Tenerife pumpkin or chilacaiota, the gourd, the chayote, broad beans, beans, peas, sweet potatoes, potatoes (semilhas, the Madeiran word), etc., etc. Among the fruit trees common below 200 or 300 metres we may mention the cherimoya tree (anoneira), the mango, the guava, the Surinam cherry, the papaya and the avocado, species that originate in hot countries and need a certain degree of warmth to live and flourish.

The species characteristic of the second zone are the vine and the chestnut, although in many places one also sees the same vegetables as in the lower zone, as well as various fruit trees that grow there too, such as orange, pear, apple, plum, peach, apricot, loquat, walnut, fig and mulberry trees, etc., etc. Cereals, and wheat in particular, are grown abundantly, above all on land without artificial irrigation, whereas from 300 or 400 metres upwards sugar cane is a poorly rewarding plant, because of the low sugar content of its juice. Cherry trees are grown in the damp, cool valleys of the upper part of the second zone, sometimes living alongside the laurel, the til and the vinhático, magnificent members of the laurel family that belong to the native forest flora.

The third zone is almost entirely given over to fodder, brushwood and wild trees. Here and there, however, it still has a few cultivated fields of wheat and rye, and some small plots where cabbages, beans, potatoes, etc. grow. But there the sweet potato no longer yields usable tubers, the banana plant and the cherimoya tree bear no fruit, and the vine ripens its grapes only in a few places less visited by mist. It is in the third zone that the bardos are found, separating the uncultivated region from the cultivated one.

The fourth zone, which takes in the peaks of the highest mountains, has remained uncultivated to the present day. We do not believe that it will ever be put to profitable agricultural use, since it is inhospitable for most of the year and its soils are scoriaceous and shallow.

Of the useful species we have noted in the four zones into which Madeira is subdivided, the most important, whether for their yield or for the area they occupy, are sugar cane, the vine, the banana plant and wheat. Cane growing, which now covers an area of about 2,000 hectares, was until recently, and still remains, one of the most profitable crops on the island, far more lucrative than the vine and on a par with the banana. The banana covers an area of 150 to 200 hectares, while the vine and wheat must each cover some 2,000 to 2,200 hectares.

Land in Madeira is worked with the hoe; only in very few localities is the plough used, where the ground allows this agricultural implement. For various reasons Madeiran rural property is extremely subdivided, and its small plots generally combine several crops together. Curious though this association of crops is, it does not always seem to us to serve the farmer’s interests.

It should be said here that, from an agricultural point of view, our island is not as backward as is generally supposed. If farm work is done by hand almost everywhere, it is because the lie of the land does not lend itself to ploughing machinery. And if crop rotation, so necessary for good harvests, is not practised, it is because it runs counter to the extraordinary subdivision of property and sometimes also to the farmer’s interests. On the sloping land of the southern and northern flanks, it is the water that carries the main fertilising elements down from the heights. This is why many soils, neither manured nor improved by rotation, constantly maintain a certain degree of productivity.

Terracing (sorribas), manuring, the clearing and improvement of land, etc., are almost always carried out rationally in Madeira. If anything seems to us to deserve criticism, it is chiefly the little care usually given to the selection of seed and the preservation of good varieties, and the injudicious way in which the growing of trees is often managed. The poor quality of many of our fruits and the sorry appearance of many of the trees in our orchards are almost always the result of absent or badly executed pruning and of the excessive yields that fruit trees are forced to bear on the island.

It is in this industry that the most important elements of the public wealth and prosperity of the whole archipelago are to be found. The economic life of its population and its relative well-being depend largely on the progress and development of agriculture.

The two principal crops, which on account of their rewarding profits occupy the most fertile land and the largest area, are sugar cane and the vine, both almost as old as the first work of colonisation. In the last three decades banana growing has developed extraordinarily, and together with the two preceding crops it makes up what are called the three rich crops of Madeira.

The oldest is the cultivation of sugar cane, which was the main factor in the rapid growth of the population in various parts of the island after its discovery. Its production has not held steady over time, because of the diseases that at times attacked the canefields and also because of economic causes of a local nature. At present this crop is perhaps the most considerable source of public wealth, above all in the southern region of Madeira nearest the coast. This is not only because of its remunerative price but also because of the fodder it provides for raising livestock and the raw material it supplies for preparing the manures known as fold manures (adubos de curral). The area under sugar cane must be approximately two thousand hectares. The yield per hectare has varied, ranging from twenty to thirty-five tonnes, with the average at present being approximately thirty. Over the last four years its average total output across the whole archipelago was forty-six million four hundred and forty thousand kilos each year.

The cultivation of the vine is also today a considerable source of wealth and prosperity. Like sugar cane, it has had mixed fortunes, depending on the period, on particular local circumstances and above all on diseases, which have already once caused the complete extinction of the crop, as happened around the middle of the 19th century. Little by little the vineyards were replanted, and for some decades now the production of must throughout the archipelago has been remarkable. We have seen elsewhere that the area under this crop is about two thousand hectares, with an average yield of six to seven pipas of wine per hectare. Vines normally grow from the coast up to an altitude of 500 metres, some reaching 600 and even 700 metres.

For various reasons, the work of the wine growers in recent years was barely rewarding, or rather ruinous, because of the low price at which their musts were sold. Wine production in the period from 1910 to 1930 was as follows:

Years	Litres
1910	5,135,994
1911	7,609,411
1912	8,468,683
1913	6,787,968
1914	6,088,310
1915	6,579,574
1916	9,260,397
1917	2,843,518
1918	5,352,890
1919	8,041,177
1920	6,929,287
1921	4,881,355
1922	5,946,635
1928	5,193,315
1929	7,114,656
1930	11,956,300

In the five years 1918–1922, average annual production was about 6 230.000 litres. It did not fall in the decade from 1923 to 1931, so it may be conjectured that over the last ten years the archipelago produced an annual average of approximately 6,500,000 litres of wine, that is, 1,300 pipas of five hundred litres.

The municipalities of Funchal and Câmara de Lobos (‘seals’ den’) have the largest wine production, followed by those of São Vicente, Porto Moniz, Porto Santo and Calheta. It is on the southern coast of Madeira that the vines are found which supply the raw material for the fortified wines of worldwide reputation, and the parish (freguesia) of Câmara de Lobos deserves special mention as the place where the finest musts of the archipelago are produced. The principal and most celebrated varieties grown were Sercial (white grape variety), Malmsey, Boal and Verdelho, from which specialised types of wine were made; the first two, once aged, were the most precious kinds of fortified wine in the whole world. With the phylloxera invasion, new resistant rootstocks were introduced onto which the old varieties were grafted, but the specialised selection for making the different kinds has been maintained only on a very limited scale.

The richest aid to agriculture is the distinctive irrigation system formed by the numerous and important aqueducts known as levadas (irrigation channel), which are spread through every parish of Madeira. We shall deal with them in due detail. The articles Banana, Sugar Cane, Wines and Agricultural Board (Junta Agrícola) are relevant to this subject of agriculture.