Brazil coffee pickers flee farms for factory floor

By Peter Murphy

SAO SEBASTIAO DO PARAISO, Sept 10 (Reuters) - 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.

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