Brazil's crop supply agency Conab noted an "intense trade in machinery, mainly harvesters," in the main coffee-growing states of S?o Paulo and Minas Gerais this season, in response to a 46 percent average rise in day laborer wages from a year earlier.

Large producers in Brazil, which supplies about a third of the world's coffee, started buying machinery, much of it from the United States, 15 years ago. Now modernization has become a necessity for cash-strapped small farmers.

Michael Reguim, 26, purchased an automated harvester in 2008 and this season became the first in his mountain community of 82 farmers to buy a machine that strips the skin off coffee cherries, a job he previously paid four people to do.