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.