Plucking (aka harvesting)

As of now, mid-November, the harvest of Arabica coffee is happening everywhere coffee is grown in Oku. Since Oku is not uniform geographically or climatically, there are villages down in the valleys where the berries get ripe earlier (Mbam or Ngham, for example) and up high in the hills where red berries only show up a few weeks later (Emlah or Jiyane, say). Coffee is on just about everyone’s mind, either because they have their own coffee to harvest and process or they want to try to buy some coffee now while the price is low and make a little profit in a few weeks when the price inflates a bit.

I’ve spent a few mornings with people plucking a few baskets of cherries. As with most things, I’m slow. Not as slow as when I was picking the specialty beans at the mill back in May, but pretty slow. But it’s nice to have someone else in the field with you when you’re doing work like this, so I’m sure no one minds. At least I’m good at not dropping the berries, which would probably annoy people.

This may all be cryptic to anyone who hasn’t been close to coffee trees, so let’s back up. Arabica coffee is harvested a few times over the course of a season, because the cherries do not ripen all at the same time. Harvesters select only the ripened berries (or pretty close to ripened berries) and leave the green berries on the stem to continue maturing. This is a little tricky because coffee berries grow in clusters and are attached to the tree by a little forked stem (the peduncle) so when you try to pluck a single ripe berry it is easy to detach at least one or two unripe ones you didn’t mean to. Then they drop on the ground and its a pain to bend over to retrieve them and sometimes a pain to find them in the grass. This is why farmers here see clearing the weeds from the field as a necessary prerequisite to starting the harvest season.

I know that in other parts of the world, harvesters will go out to the field with matts or skirts to place under the trees during harvest to catch these wayward fruits, but here (I’ll say this with nothing to back me up) each tree yields so little and you move through the field so quickly that the time needed to lay down a skirt and constantly move it wouldn’t be reasonable. On the other hand, if you read up on Coffee Berry Disease (the scourge of the crop here) removing diseased berries from the field is recommended pretty much unanimously and using a skirt during harvesting can make that a lot easier.

When you do get the berries you want in your hand, you drop them in your basket or sac and move on to the next ones. If you ask someone around here how much coffee they harvested today, they’ll answer you with some number of ‘tins’, by which they mean 20-liter buckets. Later these same tins become the basic unit of measure for how much parchment coffee a person has to sell. When we are talking about well dried parchment, a tin can be estimated as about 9kgs and about seven tins will fill one sac. Meanwhile, two tins of berries eventually become about one tin of dry parchment (after you remove the cherry and dry the bean).

Control

Control

This past week, I (partially we, but I think I need to take as much responsibility for this as possible) decided to sanction a group of growers. That means that we are not going to buy any of their coffee as organic this year and that we will give them a set of corrective actions they will need to perform in order to leave the dreaded list of ‘Sanctioned Growers’. It is likely that their field will also be reverted to in-conversion status, forcing them to wait another three years before their coffee can be regarded as organic, I’ll take a little more time to decide if this part is necessary. This group gets the dubious distinction of being the first people to be sanctioned by Mocha Joes Organic Growers...congratulations. 

What happened is that these guys got hung up on something we said early on while publicizing the program: that we were limiting the number of growers we would work with in any area to five. They are all close family members and they all control small parts of what used to be their father’s (or uncle’s or grandfather’s, it’s hard to get precise details on lineage here) field. This is no problem, we were happy to map the whole field and include all of their coffee in the program. The hitch showed up this week when one of these growers told us that someone had used herbicide in a small portion of the field. The following line of questioning ensued (approximately):

“Who used herbicide?”

“Alfred.”

“I don’t know Alfred, why would he use herbicide in your field?”

“Well it is his portion.”

“But I’ve never met Alfred, how could his portion be in this program?”

“Well, his portion is just in the middle, and you said we were limited to five people, so we thought we would just make sure Alfred understood all the rules and...”

“So how many people share this field?”

“Eight.”

“Holy shit.”

This is a strange situation in that the more I think about it, the more bananas it seems to be. Also, the more cut and dry that the growers involved were acting in a way that risked the integrity of our organic product. Enter the Internal Control System – Let’s reference our handy ICS Manual (yeah, we’ve got one of those) and see what it says...ah, here it is:

Another kind of control, using flags to separate fields.

State of Non-compliance - The farmer engages in an action that risks the integrity of his/her organic production (e.g. storing treated products with organic coffee, spraying crops with equipment used for agrochemicals) and reports this to a field officer or Internal Inspector.

Result - The farmer is not sanctioned. Products that may be affected may not be purchased as organic and any fields that may be affected are reverted to in-conversion status.

Maybe these guys don’t need to be sanctioned after all. On the other hand, maybe this other article more accurately describes the situation:

State of Non-compliance - The farmer engages in an action that risks the integrity of his/her organic production (e.g. storing treated products with organic coffee, spraying crops with equipment used for agrochemicals) and this action is discovered by a field officer or Internal Inspector.  

Result - The farmer is temporarily sanctioned. An investigation is performed to determine if the farmer knowingly risked the integrity of the organic program. If yes, the farmer is permanently sanctioned and excluded from the program. If not, the farmer is proscribed corrective measures to guard against a similar event and the farmer's entire operation is reverted to in-conversion status. Following completion of the corrective measures the sanction is lifted. If the farmer remains temporarily sanctioned for more than one year they are permanently sanctioned.

Granted, the farmers did tell me about the spraying of the herbicide, but it did require some small investigation on my part to determine that this field was a veritable clown car of hidden growers. I don’t feel that these farmers were knowingly risking the integrity of the product; they were just acting very irresponsibly. Does this situation fall somewhere in between the two descriptions above? Kind of, but definitely leaning toward the later. So, I guess I’ll be breaking the bad news to these guys in the next couple of days; no organic coffee for them until 2016. Not the funnest part of my job.