Sao Sebastiao do Paraiso, Sept 10 - When machine harvesters rolled on to his coffee farm for the first time this year to pull ripe cherries from the trees, Jarbos Diogo Pereira broke a decades-old tradition of using only manual labor.
"There used to be a whole line of people working here for my father," he said, pointing to the hills planted with neat columns of trees. "It was a very social thing."
Around half the 35 workers needed to gather the crop by hand returned this year. Pereira, who now runs the farm, ultimately gave up trying to find more hands and hired two harvesters supplied with trained operators.
"Machines are expensive but one of them can do the work of 20 or 30 people," said Pereira.
Laborers in farming areas across the world's top coffee grower this year have ditched seasonal and physically demanding agricultural work to take up opportunities arising in upcountry towns as an economic boom reaches them.
Adriano Rodriguez, 31, gave up coffee harvesting a few seasons ago. Now working as a joiner repairing the wall of a hardware shop in Sao Sebastiao do Paraiso, a coffee town in the north of Minas Gerais state, he does not miss the work.
"It's hot, you have to wake up early and the food is cold," he said.
All of Rodriguez's six brothers and sisters worked at one time or another as coffee pickers. But they have found better pay and stability in the region's shoe and clothing factories.
"In this town there were no other options but there are now," he said as workers in blue overalls from one nearby plant strolled down the street at lunch hour.
The agriculture ministry said in a coffee report this week that harvesters were being bought up as fast as they were being produced. It said unmet demand for machines, which it also attributed to high manual labor costs, had held up harvesting this year.
FEW TEARS
Brazil's economy is growing at its fastest pace in three decades driving unemployment down near an all-time low and pushing wages higher.
The economic boom is hastening the demise of the manual coffee laborer in more ways than one. The fewer available workers available command higher wages, prompting more farmers to figure they would be better off mechanizing.
While automation in industry is often painful for workers left jobless or needing to retrain, few tears have been shed by farm workers abandoning plantations or farmers trimming costs.
"I think in about six years time there will be no more workers," said former laborer Carlos Roberto Soares who now drives a bus to transport farm workers.
"There's no labor in cotton. It used to employ millions of people here," he said, puffing on a cigarette while waiting for coffee pickers to board his bus parked at a large farm in the town of Restinga as the sunset turned the horizon pink.
The sugar cane sector also is adopting machine harvesting. New laws prohibiting burning of sugar cane foliage in Sao Paulo state will take effect in 2014, necessitating more machine harvesting in the world's top cane grower.
Coffee producers and roasters say there is no perceptible difference in the quality of beans harvested by hand or machine. But they say machine operators must take care to avoid damaging the trees.
Strict labor laws and taxation on casual workers are another nail in the coffin for manual labor, farmers say.
Growers in hilly areas have no alternative to manual laborers. But even they have been raising productivity, equipping workers with hand-held strimmer-like machines that shake the cherries from the branches.
One coffee picker who actually enjoys the work is Jose Joaquim dos Santos, 72, who has worked in agriculture for more than three decades and labors on the farm in Restinga.
"I enjoy this. It's better for me at my age," he said, adding co-workers now gone to the factories had mixed views.
"Some of them say it's good. Others don't like it."