"In the framework of the productive and social diversity that characterized the Costa Rican agricultural panorama of the late nineteenth century, the dominant coffee activity suffered its first great disenchantment with the crisis of 1897, the price to pay for being a mono-export economy dependent on the oscillation of the This crisis also brought into question the limitations of the coffee industry, which had begun to show up since the 1870s, after this difficult situation, the economy and the Costa Rican State will suffer another blow during the First World War between 1914 and 1919 This period between crises is the one that frames the temporal context of this research, where a first stage of the institutionalization of the liberal agrarian policies around the foundation of the National Society of Agriculture (SNA) and the Department of Agriculture (DAG) is lived. ).
In the nineteenth century the development of the coffee economy had been favored by a series of state policies related to the privatization of land and the drive to colonization, although with the crisis of the century the challenge of the State was also to seek a leading role in modernization and agricultural diversification. In this context, the liberal State, the elites and the scientists of the moment put part of their experiences, hopes and efforts around the agricultural and livestock sector in the creation and development of the SNA. His life, which lasted from 1903 to 1912, marked a before and after with respect to the articulation of liberal agrarian policies of diversification, experimentation, modernization and agricultural extension. "