During the forty years of Brazil’s First Republic (1890–1930), Brazilian agriculture responded to pressures from the global marketplace and domestic reformers to make modest adjustments to its structural reality. The accepted truth that Brazil was an “essentially agricultural” nation dictated the First Republic’s agrarian elites’ response to major problems undermining their major cash crops—coffee and sugar. By the turn of the century, both were suffering severe crises. Coffee cultivation suffered from the twin scourges of declining productivity in some zones and excessive worldwide production.