Before the “Fascist Labscapes:” Origin and Development of Plant Breeding in Portugal, 1862-1926

Abstract Plant breeding is one of the main factors sustaining the increase in agricultural productivity over the past two centuries. Despite some methodological obstacles to historical research, there is already extensive knowledge about the origins and early development of plant breeding in most European countries, the US, and East Asia. Portugal is absent from the international literature on this subject, and the existing studies focus mainly on the period from the 1930s onwards, connecting plant breeding to the establishment of the dictatorship and its goals of food self-sufficiency. The aim of this article is to analyse the origins and early stages of plant breeding in Portugal and placing them in the international context of this subject. Based on a wide range of sources, this study concludes that plant breeding began in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century and became reasonably well established by the early twentieth century, with the development of “Portuguese” hybrid varieties that were distributed to farmers.