A Brief Respite

In one weeks’ time I’m going to be flying back to the US for a month long break. I’m very excited about it. After that, I’ll be returning to Oku to keep working on the organic coffee program for another year. During the last couple of months of that year I’ll be working to phase myself out of the program and train someone to replace me. Since I’m about to leave for a few weeks, this is not a great time to start new things, but there is still so much untapped potential here in Oku that I think I’ll just write a list of some things I hope to accomplish in the next year. Here goes.

1. Get the volume of organic coffee produced in Oku up to 9 tons (from the 3ish we are hoping for this year).

2. Revisit all of the farmers that we interviewed for field entry, but didn’t get to do internal inspections for. Make sure they are still interested and get them on our roster for 2013.

3. Begin a fair and transparent waiting list for farmers that would like to join the group and become certified organic.

4. Hold a general meeting of our farmer-partners to encourage greater autonomy and self-assessment within the program. This should become an at least annual event.

5. Have at least 9 compost piles (one in each village) being actively and successfully managed.

6. Have at least 9 fields (one in each village) featuring a significant cover crop.

7. Identify (or create) some market streams for organic inputs that are not easy or possible for farmers to obtain right now: top of the list are at least one organic fertilizer option (like blood/bone meal), botanical pesticides (like neem or derris root [thoughts on that anyone?]), and companion crop seeds.

8. Continue monthly training meetings and have an attendance rate of at least 50% of farmer-partners each month with each farmer-partner attending at least 50% of meetings in 2013 (Does that sound like a really low bar to anyone else? Maybe we’ll revise that up around May or June).

9. Begin training a replacement for myself from 4-months before my scheduled departure. This will take a few intermediate steps like: find a field of suitable applicants to take on the job of ‘Director of Organic Certification’ (awesome title, right?) and hiring an assistant from that pool.