Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Ardito in Portugal: Plant Breeding and the Fascist Corporatist State

After the discussion of Strampelli’s strains and their resistance to lodging, it doesn’t take much to understand the importance of technoscientific organisms in making plausible the alternative modernity of Portuguese fascism. Large estates maintained and expanded through chemical fertilizers made sense only if there were plants that could profit from them without lodging. And here I’m not making just a comparative formal remark between Italy and Portugal. In fact, the Italian case meant much more than an inspiring example useful for quotations in newspapers and leaflets praising Mussolini and his policies. The soils of both countries, trusted with the burden of feeding the two nations and enhancing the qualities of the Italian and Portuguese populations, were to be related in a much more material way. The Portuguese wheat estates were also cultivated with Strampelli’s “elite races,” Ardito and Mentana.

^{Figure 2.4 Artur Pastor, “Mechanic Sower, Alentejo, 1940s.}

^{(Fundo Artur Pastor, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa)}

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]