Until the 1960s, rural laborers and peasants composed the majority of Brazil's population and yet most scholars have downplayed their influence on the country's history. The Seed Was Planted, by contrast, argues that rural labor has been fundamental to the making of modern Brazil.

When the Brazilian military took power in 1964, anarchy in the countryside was one of the problems the conspirators used to justify ousting the civilian government. Cliff Welch examines this claim by narrating the history of rising rural worker activism in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most influential state.

Between a major revolt in 1924 and the 1964 coup d'etat, Sao Paulo rural workers gradually gained a place in Brazilian politics by seizing opportunities from ruling class initiatives designed to reform the agricultural economy. Welch shows how laws composed to incorporate rural workers in a controlled way became platforms for unexpected protest and political mobilization culminating in the 1963 Rural Laborer Statute (ETR). The unprecedented legitimacy the law brought the rural labor movement further spurred the agrarian mobilization cut short by the 1964 coup.

Drawing on rural worker letters, court records, news accounts, landlord observations, government studies, as well as personal anecdotes gathered in oral interviews, The Seed Was Planted offers a rich and engaging sense of how rural labor politics were structured and experienced during this crucial period of modern Brazilian history.