Sustainable Harvest

Check out this podcast from Carly Griggs, a Sustainable Harvest Fellow based in our Kigoma, Tanzania office, where she supports our farmer training projects. Carly joined Sustainable Harvest in February as part of Sustainable Harvest’s fellowship program.

Recently, she took advantage of time during an internet outage in the Kigoma office to put together the following update for us on the latest news from the Kanyovu cooperative as the harvest begins.

Stay tuned for more updates from Carly and our other fellows as they experience life abroad with Sustainable Harvest.

When Clemente Oblitas delivers milk to the primary school in his town in Peru, his neighbors call out, “Buenos días, lechero!” (“Good morning, milk man!”). Clemente has been a dairy farmer for many years, in addition to producing coffee on his land. Over the years, Clemente has been successful in both his dairy and his coffee endeavors, and he has become a leader of the APROECO coffee cooperative. But there is more to his nickname: in Peru, lechero also means “the lucky one.” Given his recent good fortune to visit the United States for the first time to learn about the coffee industry and supply chain, he’ll tell you his luck has rarely been better.

In the past month, Clemente experienced several firsts, including an airplane flight and a visit to the U.S., where he attended the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s (SCAA) annual conference in Anaheim, California and visited Sustainable Harvest’s headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

Clemente came to the U.S. with three fellow Peruvian co-op leaders – Dario Roman from the APESI cooperative, Cesar Montalvam of CAPEMA, and Alvaro Prada from ADISA, as part of an exchange visit organized by Sustainable Harvest and funded by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

Four coffee producers from Peru joined Sustainable Harvest at the SCAA's annual conference this April to learn about coffee in a consumer country. From left to right: Alvaro Prada, Dario Roman, Katie Gilmer, Clemente Oblitas, Chabela Cerqueda, Cesar Montalvam, Olga Cuellar.

During the visit to the SCAA annual conference, the farmers had the opportunity to meet with several of their business partners from other countries, as well as with NGOs and institutions that work to improve coffee producers’ lives, and learned about coffee marketing and retailing in the U.S. marketplace.

After the SCAA conference, the four Peruvians traveled to Portland to see firsthand the roasting and retail segments of the coffee supply chain. Most small-holder producers only hear bits and pieces about how coffee is consumed in countries like the United States, and there were many things that surprised the farmers. None of them were prepared for the sheer number of coffee drinkers they encountered on the street with to-go cups and in coffee shops and bars.

“When I got up this morning,” Dario from APESI commented one day in Portland, “and looked at the hotel window, I saw three people walking past carrying cups from local coffee shops. That seemed like a lot to me, but when I came to the Sustainable Harvest office and told this story, people laughed and said, ‘What, only three people? Where was everyone else?’”

At the end of the trip, Clemente, el lechero, said that he felt luckier than ever to have had the chance to visit the United States for the SCAA show and to see first hand the coffee industry in Portland. Bringing this information back to his cooperative, he can better lead the other farmers in negotiating the specialty market and producing top quality coffee.

- Olga Cuellar, Development Manager, Lima, Peru

The many members of the coffee supply chain have a lot that they can learn from one another. A Colombian producer who makes his own fertilizer can be a great resource for a Nicaraguan cooperative looking to make some fertilizer of its own. A water-saving technique used at a Tanzanian washing station can be valuable for a Burundian washing station as well.

At Sustainable Harvest, we promote the efficiency and quality improvement that come from peer-to-peer information exchange among coffee producers across the world. Often, though, those that stand to learn the most from one other live very far apart, and the opportunities for them to collaborate face-to-face are few and far between. This is why our staff at origin make a point of facilitating peer exchanges among producers in our supply chain,  using the technology that we have available in our origin offices.

Diracsema and Israel of the 21st of September cooperative, used Skype to share information on women's coffee lots with interested producers from the Aprocassi cooperative in Peru.

Clemente recently sent us a snapshot of such an exchange happening at our office in Oaxaca, Mexico: Diracsema Jose, the President, and Israel Paz,  staff at the 21^st of September cooperative in Oaxaca, having a Skype conversation with members of the Aprocassi Cooperative in Cajamarca, Peru.

Two years ago, the 21^st of September began separating and tracking the coffee grown by its women members. The co-op sold these  ‘women’s lots’ as a specialty item for consumers who wanted to support the economic development of women in origin countries. When Clemente learned that Aprocassi was interested in doing a similar project, he arranged for them to have a conference call with the 21^st of September. Over Skype, Diracsema imparted her experience tracking, cupping, and separating women’s lots for special sale with a producer from Aprocassi, providing him with an understanding of how he could implement the project in his own community.

To learn more about how our offices situated at origin facilitate peer-to-peer interactions and support the production of quality coffee, check out our new video.

Thangale teaches Burundian farmers about best practices for drying coffee parchment.

As we left the city of Bujumbura in Burundi in the late afternoon and wound up into the highlands on our way to Ngozi, where we would spend the next 3 days completing a washing station managers training, I was struck by how much everything felt like Christmas. Perhaps it was the obvious drop in temperature which left me feeling chilled for the first time since I left England almost a year ago. Or maybe it was the change in vegetation such that trees not dissimilar to the infamous Christmas Fir scattered the skyline. Or perhaps it was even the little symmetrical houses that lined the roads with their perfectly placed doors between two windows under sloping roofs that resembled those sitting on snow-covered hilltops, covered in glitter on many a traditional Christmas card. Or even the smell of dew-covered trees and smoke coming from open fires. Whatever the reason, I was excited to be in such a beautiful country after a long days drive from Kigoma!

After arriving in Ngozi, we checked into our hotel and enjoyed dinner with our hosts from Michigan State University and DAI who work on the Burundi Agriculture Project before heading to bed. On Wednesday morning we headed to the training center to meet various washing station managers, cooperative representatives and university students we had been invited to train. While I kept myself busy snapping photos and taking notes, Sustainable Harvest agronomist Thangale started the day with a great overview about Sustainable Harvest and the success of our partner, Kanyovu cooperative in Kigoma. Having definitely impressed the audience, he continued with an explanation of the managerial organization and structure of Kanyovu and the daily activities at washing stations, which were then compared to the practices in Ngozi. A great deal of knowledge,  experience, challenges, and means of overcoming them was shared. After lunch, Boss presented all the different ways high-quality coffee can be achieved, covering everything from good farm practices and harvesting, right through to storage and export — from the plant to the cup. Again he received lots of questions about practices and successes in Kigoma, and it was obvious the participants learned a lot of new information.

Drying tables at the washing station in the Gasura - Kirundo region of Burundi

Day two commenced with a field trip to a washing station in the Gasura – Kirundo region, about half an hour from the Rwandan border. The harvest has already started there, so we got to see everything in action from fermentation to washing and finally drying. Thangale did a very interactive, practical training on how to correctly detect any defected or diseased beans that made it to the washing stage, and he emphasized the importance of eliminating such beans before the drying stage. This session was followed by a hands-on training in composting using coffee pulp.

We then headed back to the center to round out the day with a presentation on quality control systems. Again there were lots of questions about practices in Kigoma – how are sample collected, where are they cupped, by whom? etc. When we revealed the quality of Kanyovu coffee and the prices farmers earned last year, there was an air of amazement among the audience, mixed with feelings of excitement when Boss told the participants that if they follow the advice given to increase the quality of their coffee they could be in the same position in the not so distant future.

Thangale and Boss, Sustainable Harvest agronomists, teach Burundian farmers how to create organic compost fertilizers using coffee pulp

On the last morning we completed our training starting with (if I dare say) an excellent presentation by Thangale on marketing, promotions and relationships with buyers, followed by a talk on finances and (by popular demand) traceability practices in Kigoma. Before heading back to Bujumbura, we took a group photo and conducted an assessment of the training, which communicated 100% positive feedback.

Overall, our three days were full of presentations, practical training, questions, note scribbling, photos, discussions, smiles and giggles from both the Burundians and the Tanzanian staff from Sustainable Harvest. From a personal perspective, I feel very lucky to have been involved in this trip. I’ve learned a lot myself, and it was great to finally see a working washing station and visualize a lot of what has previously been just terminology to me – fermentation tanks, de-pulping, defected beans and pyramid drying, to give but a few examples. And all this with the beautiful  Burundian hills as a backdrop.

- Carly Griggs, Origin Fellow in Kigoma, Tanzania