date:Aug 26, 2014
Years of low coffee prices followed by the worst drought in decades in Brazil have pushed even the smallest family farmers to buy modern machinery rather than rely on increasingly scarce and expensive labor.
Brazil's crop supply agency Conab noted an intense trade in machinery, mainly harvesters, in the main coffee-growing states of So Paulo and Minas Gerais this season, in response to a 46 percent average rise in day laborer wages from a year earlier.
Large producers in Brazil, which supplies