1. Blockchain

The coffee supply chain can be complicated and expensive for growers, and conscious consumers don’t always know where their coffee comes from. A number of companies, including Bext360, are using blockchain to trace the supply chain from field to cup. The company says that using blockchain eliminates uncertainty on the part of farmers, who rely on middlemen. In addition, it allows consumers to see exactly where their coffee comes from by simply scanning a QR code on their bag of beans. Only time will tell if blockchain will provide promised financial gains to farmers.

2. Mobile Payments

Getting coffee from field to market takes time, and often farmers aren’t paid until months after their harvests. With mobile payments, farmers can be paid for their haul on the spot instead of waiting until the beans arrive at their final destination. The United Nations Mobile Money for the Poor team in Uganda worked with coffee exporter Kyangalanyi Coffee Limited to digitize payments of the crop to promote transparency and expedite compensation. The project is ongoing, and the practice of mobile payments is gaining traction in the area. But, according to a recent paper on the first phase of the project, gaining access to rural communities is difficult and, of course, farmers need mobile phones to participate.

3. Weather Stations

A lack of information is another problem faced by farmers. With climate change making precipitation and weather increasingly unpredictable, companies like Climate Edge are creating mobile weather stations that farmers can put in their fields. The stations give real-time weather calculations, and custom software assesses weather conditions and offers support and advice to farmers using mobile data. Of course, this technology isn’t free. But, even though the company has not yet finalized a price, cofounder Paul Baranowski says, “We’re trying to make sure that this is a minor cost that has major benefits for farmers.”

4. Phone Apps

While some companies are focusing on trendy new technologies, the cellphone can still be one of the most important tools in a farmer’s toolbox. WhatsApp allows farmers to message other farmers, buyers and agronomists for advice, diagnostic apps like Plantix and Plant Doctor help them identify new pests and diseases in their fields, and weather apps let them know if they should be preparing for rain or shine. However, since many farms are in rural areas, they may be out of range for phone and data networks.

The post Can Technology Save Coffee? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Coffee growing in Trifinio region in Guatemala

Sitting around a table in Ocotepeque, Honduras, a small town near the border of El Salvador and Guatemala, sharing coffee and baleadas, I ask the group I’m seated with about what factors go into making a good-quality cup of coffee.

“Producers need to clean residue from the machines they use for processing,” says one person.

“Don’t put coffee on the humid ground,” adds another. “Nearby animals can affect the flavor!”

What’s exceptional about these six coffee experts is their age: mostly 19 and 20, and one as young as 15. This group of teenagers — four young men and two young women — is part of Generaciones, a project that focuses on helping the children of coffee producers and other youth with experience in coffee find work in the coffee industry.

Generaciones is part of a larger initiative by Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) that focuses on coffee and the people who grow it. It operates in Central America’s Trifinio region, an area that encompasses parts of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The average coffee grower in the Trifinio region is 50 to 60 years old and struggling. One big reason for this is climate change. Temperatures are rising, making it harder to produce high-quality Coffea arabica in the altitudes where it is currently grown. Rains are becoming erratic and unpredictable. When they come too early, plants flower prematurely; when they don’t come soon or often enough, plants die of thirst. In addition, a fungus called la roya — “coffee leaf rust” in English — has been wreaking havoc on Central American coffee since 2012. Despite all this, coffee prices are currently at an all-time low, thanks to increased production from Brazil. The price right now is hovering around $1 a pound.

Many of the children of these growers see what’s happening and want no part of it. Even their parents are telling them that this isn’t a good life for them. “Who will produce coffee in the future?” asks Belkis Vicente, a project technician for Generaciones. “That is the big question.”

Without a coffee industry in the Trifinio region, these kids may be forced to leave in search of other economic opportunities and migrate to cities or out of the country. Many people from the area try to go as far north as the United States. “The migration of young people here is growing more every day,” says Vicente.

Along with HRNS, she believes that there is a future in coffee in Central America. But it won’t look the same as it did for the previous generation. “We don’t pretend that growing coffee is the same as before, because of climate change,” says Vicente.

Coffee rust on a coffee leaf

To help coffee in the region adapt to the changing climate, participants learn about climate-smart growing techniques, such as planting trees to create shade and prevent erosion, spacing coffee plants farther apart to allow room for mulch to lower soil temperature, using beneficial fungi like Trichoderma spp., and applying lime and gypsum to the soil to lower its acidity. They also understand that, due to the unpredictability of commodity pricing, the future of coffee for them will be in producing specialty coffee at specialty prices, so they are very focused on the quality of coffee over the quantity. “We’re a country of coffee producers,” says 19-year-old Elder Vicente, one of the participants. “We should know about what we’re producing.”

Generaciones isn’t just focused on growing coffee, though each participant is required to grow a small plot of coffee using climate-smart techniques. “There are other opportunities in coffee, not just planting and harvesting,” says Belkis Vicente.

Participants can learn about becoming baristas and cupping, as well as machine repair, distribution and other aspects of the coffee industry. The project is only a few years old, but already some of its graduates have gone on to do coffee machinery repair, open a café and start a biofertilizer company using coffee waste. One graduate used what he learned to help his father’s honey business.

Biofertilizer at BIOVASA made from coffee waste

“It’s a beautiful experience, especially being a woman,” says 19-year-old Maritza Leverón. “We’re learning things that I’d never learn at home.” Along with her older brother, Kevin, a Generaciones graduate, she has started a small coffee business selling what they grow on a part of their family finca.

On my second day, I visited another group of teenagers: six young women and 15 young men. When I arrived, they were already seated in a semicircle of chairs in a church classroom. They’re also part of Generaciones, in the first phase of the project. This initial phase is less focused on coffee and more focused on personal growth and confidence building. “Sometimes the kids feel like they can’t do anything well, so you have to work on that,” says Vicente. “You ask them what they want to do and they say ‘No quiero hacer nada.’”

José Monroy, Co-manager of BIOVASA

However, this day’s lesson has to do with coffee. At the front is Kevin Leverón, co-manager of the small biofertilizer company Biovasa. He is standing up front with a whiteboard that says “costo” (or “cost”), asking the teenagers to tell him about fixed and variable costs when it comes to coffee.

“If you rent a location, is it a fixed or variable cost?” asks Leverón.

“Fixed!” some of the teenagers call out.

“Why?”

“Because it stays the same!”

Water, it turns out, is more complicated because the prices change based on use in some municipalities and remain the same, no matter what, in others.

They’re a couple of months in and, according to Vicente, the kids are already much more confident now than when they started. She says that most of the participants were too shy to speak at first. Now, they’re raising their hands, calling out and talking over one another.

Kevin Leverón at BIOVASA

Before I leave, we see the group participate in a trust exercise. Leverón and another instructor set up a maze of mousetraps, with a few small balls placed throughout. Then they blindfold one of the boys. His task is to walk through the maze and pick up the balls without getting snapped by a mousetrap. For assistance, one of the girls walks along with him. She can’t touch him, but she can give him instructions. The rest of the group is lined up against the wall. Every time the boy gets close to a mousetrap, everyone gasps. When he picks up a ball, they cheer.

Many of these teens are most interested in cupping and learning how to discern high-quality coffee. Some talk about opening repair shops in their communities, and others want to turn their family coffee farms into organic operations. The kind of work they do will, no doubt, look very different from what their parents did, but perhaps their futures will still be in coffee and in Trifinio.

The post Cultivating Coffee’s Next Generation appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Coffee rust, la roya in Spanish, showed up for the first time in Central America in the 1970s. But this epidemic, which began in late 2012, is by far the worst the region has seen. January is usually a busy time in El Sontule, the small coffee-growing community where married couple Pérez and Villarreyna live with their youngest son Wilder and two nephews, Jeyson and Freyder. It’s the harvest season, and whole families fan out across the coffee plots, harvesting their crop. But this year, the lush, green slopes have become sparse. Leaves dotted with orange spots litter the ground or rest on nearly naked plants. “It’s been a huge blow,” Pérez says. “It’s affected us so heavily that we still don’t know what we can do.”

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC1983.jpg” caption=”Marvin Pérez carries coffee beans.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

Pérez didn’t worry too much when his coffee plants first started showing the telltale orange spots of rust in the fall of 2012. A few could always be found here and there, year after year. But by December of that year, Pérez’s plants were left without leaves. “That’s when we started to worry, but it was too late,” he says. The family lost about 80 percent of their plants, and what remained produced less.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC1700.jpg” caption=”Freyder and Jeyson help their uncle, Marlon Villarreyna, and his family, pick coffee cherries.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

Almost 400,000 coffee workers across Central America lost their jobs to the rust during the 2012/2013 harvest. Many left their homes to move to already crowded cities or try their luck in the United States without papers. In Nicaragua, coffee represents over 30 percent of what USAID calls “unskilled labor” opportunities. Some people from El Sontule and the surrounding communities have left the area for the nearby city of EstelÁ­, the capital of Managua, or even Costa Rica.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC2547.jpg” caption=”Wilder Pérez Villarreyna releases black beans from their shells.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

Because the Pérez Villarreynas do not have enough coffee to sell, they are focused on diversifying their income and on food security. Up a short and steep hill just 15 minutes from their home, they grow beans that they both sell and eat. They also have a garden downhill from their house where they cultivate lettuce, cabbage, oranges, bananas, avocadoes and mangoes. Their son Wilder manages a little plot of his own where he grows potatoes to sell in EstelÁ­. “What we’re trying to do is diversify, grow different kinds of crops so that we’re not depending solely on coffee,” Pérez says.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC1347.jpg” caption=”Mefalia Villarreyna cooks lunch for her family.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

Experts debate the cause of the rust epidemic. Many, including the farmers of El Sontule, blame the rising temperatures and irregular rain patterns of climate change. Others believe the rust has taken over because the farmers have not used enough fungicides. On the other hand, ecologist John Vandermeer says that deforestation and the use of pesticides have thrown asunder intricate ecosystem relationships that have by and large kept the rust under control until now. Even though the Pérez Villarreynas grow organic, shade coffee and do not use pesticides, Vandermeer says that they are impacted by the cultivation practices of farmers they will never meet. “This is not something that can be solved by an individual farmer,” Vandermeer says. “It has to be solved at a regional level.”

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC1924.jpg” caption=”Two members of the El Sontule community wash coffee beans.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

While Pérez Villarreynas had practically no coffee to export during the 2013/2014 harvest season. They did have coffee for their own consumption, which is good news, since they drink a lot of it. All the coffee they pick goes through a depulping machine, which removes the red, hard shell from the bean. The beans are then put in sacks and left out for three days to ferment. After that, they are washed in a trough and separated into three groups for quality. The highest quality beans go to a processing facility for drying and exportation, while the second tier stays in the community.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC2051.jpg” caption=”Jeyson and Freyder separate the dried and fermented beans from their parchment.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

The beans that stay behind are dried in the sun or over a wood fire. They then go into a stone hole where they are hit with a large, wooden stick. This separates the beans from their thin parchments, which will blow away in the wind. The beans are then roasted locally in an iron roaster and taken home to be ground and enjoyed.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC2251.jpg” caption=”A heaping spoonful of the Pérez Villarreyna’s roasted coffee.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

Even if the rust crisis could be solved quickly, many scientists are saying that within the next 50 years, few of the areas in Central America currently growing Arabica coffee will still be able to. If this is true, El Sontule, at almost 4,000 feet above sea level, will eventually become too warm. The Pérez Villarreynas may have to switch to Robusta, which is inferior in quality but can grow at much lower altitudes. This would mean giving up the coffee they are so proud of, and all the hard work and money spent on reinvestment in coffee could be for naught by the time the next generations take over.

[mf_1200px_image src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DSC2162.jpg” caption=”Marvin Pérez waits for his coffee to roast with the local roaster.” captionposition=”none” parallax=”off”]

The post Battling the Coffee Rust: Photos of Farmers Fighting an Epidemic appeared first on Modern Farmer.