Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

To undertake pedigree selections in pure lines, such as the Italian elite races, seems to ignore the basic fact that their stability of properties is due to their homozygotic constitution, condemning to failure any further selection. But Câmara, in his role as head of the Genetics Laboratory of the Lisbon Agronomy Institute, was highly critical of the generalized gesture among breeders of accusing farmers of believing in the myth of degeneracy of the wheats supplied by agricultural experiment stations. The observed decay of yield or resistance properties observed by farmers in their fields was rejected by many breeders as being the result of mixing different varieties in the process of selecting seeds instead of “cultivating authentic pure lines distributed by Breeding Stations.”[59] The heterozygotic plants in the fields, with properties varying over time, were supposedly the result of careless ignorant farmers’ not following the advice of experts. The point is that Câmara was very assertive in discarding the notion of “pure line” used by most breeders with backgrounds in genetics, stating bluntly the impossibility of producing homozygotic plants concerning any of the characters worked by breeders.[60] Resistance to pathologies, drought, or cold, or properties of precocity and productivity, “are never dependent on a single gene,” being a function instead of the combination of several genes, and are “inherited following the system of quantitative characters.”[61] Against breeders who claimed to have a methodology to identify homozygotic specimens in the field, as Strampelli did, Câmara offered the counterfactual of a property depending on twenty cumulative factors—far fewer than those usually affecting properties targeted by breeders. The desired homozygotic condition in all twenty factors would surface only after 1,099,511,627,776 plants. And that figure was calculated by “considering all factors acting the same way and in the same direction, ignoring expression inhibition interactions among factors.”

In fact, the possibility of cultivating Ardito in Alentejo was due exactly to the impurity of pure lines. In the first years after being introduced, its glumes were so loose and the percentage of seeds falling to the ground so high that it was considered unlikely ever to thrive in Portugal. But according to Câmara, “the instability of the Ardito lines allowed for a segregation of relatively important amplitude.”[62] By harvest time, much more grain was collected from spikes resistant to “natural threshing than from those bearing the undesired genetic condition. Selection was thus made in the direction favorable to agriculture.” The absurdity of the concept of absolutely stable lines was obvious. Locality was still crucial in genetic flows.

Elvas would be the place selected to install the breeding plots of the National Agricultural Experiment Station (Estação Agronómica Nacional), the new institution founded in 1936 and directed by Câmara after his work for the Wheat Campaign. A town located in the northeast of Alentejo, in the heart of the Portuguese wheat belt, Elvas has the driest climate in the country. Moreover, inside a 20-kilometer radius it possesses almost all the soil types of the wheat region. Such characteristics account for why seeds originating from Elvas had been traditionally praised for their good behavior in other environments. In fact, an extension post of the Ministry of Agriculture had been founded in 1926 in Elvas to take advantage of the area’s reputation as the place for the “tuning” of wheats.[63] Like Rieti, Elvas offered the perfect conditions both for breeding research and seed production. In 1937, a year after the founding of the EAN, the breeding department started its operations, occupying and expanding the facilities of the previous extension post.

The collections that constituted the obligatory starting point of the breeders’ work originated from the Central Agricultural Station (Estação Agrária Central)—the predecessor institution of the EAN—and from the Swedish plant-breeding station at Svalöf.[64] The Central Agricultural Station collection had about 8,000 samples of Portuguese landraces, some gathered by agricultural scientists surveying the country fields and some sent in by farmers. The Swedish collection, on the other hand, probably arrived at Elvas in the hands of D. R. Victória Pires, the agricultural scientist head of the breeding department of the EAN, who in 1934 held a scholarship granted by the Board of National Education for a stay in Svalöf.[65]