Fazenda Aparecida (Urupês)

Fazenda Aparecida is a farm in Urupês, in the north-west of São Paulo state, Brazil, owned in the 1940s by Luís Crivellaro. It has no auction record, no score and no roaster listing. It is on this wiki because of one thing that happened in a field there in 1943: the coffee trees were so obviously better than everything around them that Brazil’s state agricultural institute came to look, and what it found became Mundo Novo — the variety that replanted Brazilian coffee after the war and the parent of Catuaí.¹²

The short version: seeds reached the municipality in 1928, brought up from Mineiros do Tietê. Fifteen years later the trees grown from them at Fazenda Aparecida and at a neighbouring smallholding, Sítio Bacuri (owner Pedro Mázaro), were reported to the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas (IAC) as “exceptionally developed, well-branched and productive.” IAC started researching them in 1943.¹²

Location	Urupês, São Paulo, Brazil — north-west São Paulo, the Rio Preto region12
Owner (1940s)	Luís Crivellaro12
Seed arrived	1928, from Mineiros do Tietê12
IAC research began	194312
What came out of it	Mundo Novo, released to Brazilian farmers in 1952
Neighbouring farm in the same story	Sítio Bacuri (Pedro Mázaro)12
Current status	Unknown — see the To-verify note below

Why a variety is named after a town

This is the part that makes the farm worth a note rather than a footnote.

Urupês was called Mundo Novo. The municipality was founded under that name on 24 September 1928 and only became Urupês in 1944 — renamed after urupê, a Tupi word for a bracket fungus that grows on wood, and probably after Monteiro Lobato’s book of the same title.³ So the seed arrived in a town called Mundo Novo, the trees were found in a town called Mundo Novo, and by the time the variety was formally named the town had a different name entirely.

The naming decision is recorded in the words of the IAC researcher who ran the programme, Alcides Carvalho: “the IAC Coffee Commission decided to give this variety the name Mundo Novo, in tribute to the municipality that diffused it.”¹

Read that carefully — “diffused,” not “discovered.” The variety itself is credited to a natural Bourbon × Typica cross first spotted at Mineiros do Tietê, several hundred kilometres south. What Urupês did was grow it out, prove it in the field and hand it on. Fazenda Aparecida is one of the two farms where that proof was visible enough to bring the institute in.

Of the two, Sítio Bacuri became the seed counter. Both municipal and regional accounts describe farmers queueing at Pedro Mázaro’s property for seed as word spread.¹² Fazenda Aparecida’s documented role is the earlier one: it is named alongside Bacuri as a property whose trees triggered the 1943 investigation.

What the discovery was actually worth

Brazilian coffee in the 1940s was mostly Bourbon and older material, and the complaint against it was simple: it did not produce enough.¹ Mundo Novo was tall, tough, and cropped heavily by comparison — so it spread fast, first across São Paulo and then into Paraná, and the municipal record credits that expansion with the founding of around 80 new municipalities.¹

Urupês itself went all in. By the 1970s virtually the whole of the municipality’s rural area was planted to coffee, and it only diversified after prices fell and the 1975 black frost — the same frost that destroyed Paraná’s plantations and ended that state’s run as Brazil’s leading producer.¹

The genetic afterlife is larger still. Crossed with the dwarf Caturra, Mundo Novo produced Catuaí, now one of the most-planted Arabicas in the Americas, and the trade also treats Acaiá, Icatu, Catucaí and Arara as its descendants. A great deal of coffee sold today as Brazilian, Costa Rican or Honduran carries genetics that passed through this field.

To verify — the farm after 1943

Nothing published describes what Fazenda Aparecida became. Both sources that name it do so in the past tense, as part of a history of the variety. No source consulted states whether the property still exists, whether it still grows coffee, who owns it now, its size, altitude, or any cupping score — and no website, social account or farm page for it could be located. It should be read as a historical site, not a producer you can buy from.

The corollary matters for anyone searching: “Fazenda Aparecida” is an extremely common Brazilian farm name, after Nossa Senhora Aparecida, Brazil’s patron saint. Hits for the name are far more likely to be a different property than this one.

To verify — do not confuse this with the Carmo de Minas farm

The research behind this note initially matched “Fazenda Aparecida” to Fazenda Nossa Senhora Aparecida in Carmo de Minas, Minas Gerais — a completely different, still-operating specialty farm about 500 km away in the Mantiqueira de Minas region, run by the Villela family. That farm’s record was confirmed directly against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence farm directory: farmer Edmo Junqueira Villela, Brazil Naturals 2018, rank 29, 87.59 points, natural Bourbon, 450 kg lot, 1,250 m, 200 ha with 100 ha in coffee — and a Cup of Excellence grand prize in 2013 at 92.22.⁴

None of that belongs to Urupês. The two farms share a devotional name and nothing else — different state, different region, different family, different century of relevance. The Carmo de Minas farm deserves its own note; it is listed as a separate research topic rather than merged in here.

To verify — one detail sits oddly with the variety record

The Urupês municipal account describes the original plant as a natural cross between Bourbon and “Sumatra” coffee, found by a farmer nicknamed “Caboclo” at Mineiros do Tietê.¹ World Coffee Research records the parentage as Bourbon × Typica, and as this wiki’s Typica note explains, “Sumatra” is one of WCR’s listed trade names for Typica itself — so these are the same cross under different vocabulary, not a contradiction. The “Caboclo” nickname, however, appears only in this municipal text and no primary IAC document naming the finder was consulted. Treat the finder’s identity as local tradition.

Why it matters

Coffee farms usually earn a note here by winning something. This one earns it by being an origin point.

• Variety names are geography. “Mundo Novo” is not a marketing word or a botanist’s Latin — it is the old name of a town in São Paulo, given by a committee as thanks. Half the variety names in coffee work this way, and almost none of them explain themselves on the bag.
• The best plants get found, not bred. Mundo Novo was a natural cross that a farmer noticed and an institute followed up on. The same shape recurs across the variety catalogue: Bourbon, Typica and Caturra are all discoveries before they are breeding programmes.
• Farm-level history is the first thing lost. Alcides Carvalho has a research centre named after him. The two farms whose trees started the investigation have a paragraph on a municipal website and one regional newspaper article between them — and one of them has no traceable existence today at all.

Related

• Mundo Novo — the variety found here, named after this municipality’s former name
• Brazil · Paraná — the country the variety rebuilt, and the state it spread into before the 1975 frost
• Instituto Agronômico · Alcides Carvalho — the institute that came to Urupês in 1943 and the breeder who ran it
• Bourbon · Typica — the two parents of the cross
• Caturra · Catuaí · Acaiá — the dwarf it was crossed with, and the descendants that carry it forward
• Fazenda Paie Filho · Daterra · Camocim Estate · Cerrado Mineiro — the modern Brazilian farms and regions on this wiki, all of them documented by competition rather than by history
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition record this farm has none of, and the directory that documents the farm it is confused with
• World Coffee Research — the catalogue that records Mundo Novo’s parentage and release dates
• Natural process — Brazil’s default processing, then and now

Official links

• (no official website found — the farm has no locatable web presence of its own)
• Official site — Prefeitura Municipal de Urupês: Café Mundo Novo — the municipality’s own history page, the most authoritative source naming the farm

Footnotes

1. Prefeitura Municipal de Urupês — Café Mundo Novo — confirmed via WebFetch; municipal government history page, source of the 1928 arrival of seed from Mineiros do Tietê, the 1943 start of IAC research, Fazenda Aparecida and Luís Crivellaro, Sítio Bacuri and Pedro Mázaro, the Alcides Carvalho quotation about naming the variety, the low productivity of the Bourbon plantings it replaced, the ~80 new municipalities, the 1970s peak of coffee in Urupês and the 1975 frost, and the “Caboclo” / Bourbon-Sumatra account of the original plant ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Diário da Região — Supervalorizado no mercado, café Mundo Novo surgiu na região de Rio Preto — regional newspaper, independent of the municipal page; corroborating source for Fazenda Aparecida, Luís Crivellaro, Sítio Bacuri, Pedro Mázaro, the 1928 seed arrival and the 1943 IAC investigation ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Urupês — Wikipédia (Portuguese) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the municipality’s former name Mundo Novo, its elevation to municipality on 24 September 1928, and the 1944 renaming to Urupês after the Tupi word urupê ↩

4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory: Fazenda Nossa Senhora Aparecida, 87.59 — confirmed via WebFetch; the different Carmo de Minas farm — Edmo Junqueira Villela, Brazil Naturals 2018, rank 29, 87.59, natural Bourbon, 450 kg lot, 1,250 m, 200 ha / 100 ha, Mantiqueira de Minas, and the 2013 Cup of Excellence grand prize at 92.22 ↩