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).