Advances I: The Plan

   This week we are getting ready to give out some advances to farmers in Oku and Mbessa. Advances are not peculiar to low-income farmers or countries like Cameroon (although the motivation behind them may be). During my work in greenhouse production in PA advances would happen up and down the production chain with the largest ones being given to us, the greenhouse, so that we could afford to purchase all the inputs needed (pots, soil, fertilizer, plants, etc.) since it would be a few months before we would see any money coming. This is standard operating procedure.

One of the local credit unions that also deals with school fees.

   In contrast, the time that advances are distributed in Oku has less to do with purchasing inputs and is more directly tied to the beginning of the school year and the need for school fees. School fees are one of the biggest financial outputs families around here have during the course of the year, the other notable ones being Christmas and, less predictably, death celebrations. All over the country you will see banks and microfinance institutions advertising loans for school fees and you’ll even hear people use school fees as an argument while haggling in the market for rice or potatoes (and it works, but not for me, I’ve tried).

   Our plan for advances comes from a ‘formula’ with three factors: past production, demand, and trust. Cassman and Philip have a pretty good idea of how many bags of coffee any farmer in Oku is going to produce and our advance is going to cover only a portion of that (maybe a third at most). Then there are some farmers who are more anxious to get an advance at this time of year. This is accounted for less explicitly than the production estimate. A farmer who really needs a loan is the guy who is going to ask for it while a guy with no school age children is less pressed this time of year and less inclined to approach you. Finally, trust is a critical factor in deciding who we will give an advance to. These advances are distributed very informally, no legally binding contracts, just a sheet we ask people to sign when they receive their cash. Sometimes when you go to collect from a farmer you made a loan to he has already sold it to some other jerk and you’re left high and dry. It’s a bad reputation to get and a hard one to shake, so at this point we’re confident (but not certain) that the names we have on our list belong to trustworthy people.

   This year we are going to add a fourth factor to our ‘formula’; we will be favoring farmers who are entering into our organic program. Mocha Joes is still going to be purchasing lots of inorganic coffee (something I need to remind myself to say more often as I get preoccupied with the organic program) but we want to use advances as a way to provide encouragement to farmers that are taking this chance with us.

   One thing that needs clarification: are these advances loans or purchases on spec? The difference would be the price that the coffee is ultimately sold for. Right now the price of coffee is low as it normally is at the start of the season. This is tied to the promise of a good harvest, low demand (most buyers aren’t active yet), the need for school fees, and only loosely to the world market price. As the season progresses, the price per kilogram will almost certainly go up, so a person purchasing coffee right now can get it cheap. So are we buying coffee now with these advances? No, we’re not. When we give a farmer 50,000 FCFA we aren’t buying coffee at the current price, we’re just giving an essentially 0% interest loan. When it comes time for us to collect our product we’ll have a 50,000 FCFA credit with that farmer, no more no less. From what I can gather, this is almost always to the benefit of the farmers and is the way it is done by all the parties that purchase coffee here in Oku. I hear that buyers are more ruthless elsewhere in the country but I can’t speak to those places.

   I’m hoping to get more insight into the process over the next week as we begin the distributions and will put them down in a follow-up to this post.

In Oku Ekuna means beans; Mucuna means Kevin's beans

   Something a little more ag related today. One of the requirements for organic certification is that a farmer can demonstrate that they are actively trying to improve the fertility of their soil. Farmers here in Oku don’t have a really strong grasp of nutrient cycling and the importance of replenishing all the nutrients that you take away from the farm during harvest. This makes sense when you consider the traditional strategy for tackling this problem in this part of the world was to practice shifting agriculture. Rather than managing a plot of land for long-term production when a grower saw that their yields were declining they’d move on to a new piece of land and let the exhausted plot regenerate, maybe over a few decades. Enter population pressure and perennial crops like coffee and this strategy is no longer viable.

   Chemical fertilizers are one solution to this problem (the solution of choice in many parts of the world) but not if you want to be an organic grower. When we are going around discussing organic practices with farmers we usually give them a list of input options for improving or maintaining soil fertility including compost, animal manure, and green manure (what we call green plants with good nutrient content). My personal favorite of these options is green manure coming in the form of cover crops. Compost is excellent, but requires quite a bit of labor. Also, with the piecemeal nature of many farming activities here it is hard to find a time when there is enough material available to make a good sized compost pile. Most of the suggestions about using animal manure come from parts of the world where animal manure is so abundant that it can actually become a nuisance. While there are quite a lot of goats and chickens around Oku, they are usually allowed to wander freely enough that collecting their manure is a lot of work and not a no-brainer solution.

Some mucuna seeds about to be planted.

   So cover crops: they grow exactly where you want to use them and if you choose the right species, can provide an impressive amount of nitrogen. The other benefits we hope to gain from a good cover crop are weed suppression and high biomass production. Finally, a good cover crop is going to be easy to maintain, easy to propagate, and will grow well in the shade of a coffee field. To this end, I picked up a couple of kilograms of Mucuna pruriens seed the last time I was in Bamenda. Mucuna has a good reputation as a companion crop for coffee, meeting almost all the criteria listed above. My greatest concerns are with the easy to maintain and nitrogen fixing points. Mucuna is a type of bean (aka velvet bean) and I’m worried that it could become a nuisance if it has a tendency to climb the stems of the coffee plants. Of course, if it also accomplishes weed suppression it may be a welcome trade-off to detach climbing mucuna in place of weed clearing.

   Nitrogen fixing is a concern because, as far as I know, mucuna has not been established here in Oku before. This can be a problem because in order for a nitrogen fixing plant to accomplish that task it needs to form an association with a specific type of soil bacteria (one species of bacteria to each species of plant). If the bacteria that mucuna works with is present, then we’re in luck, but if not then we’ll miss out on that benefit. We could potentially ameliorate that situation by bringing in some of that bacteria and inoculating the seed before sowing, but let’s hope we don’t need to do that.

   Right now I’m trying to find two farmers who are willing to try growing this mucuna in their farm. I don’t want to hand out lots of small amounts of seed because I don’t think anyone will gain much from that kind of experience. Also, to try to increase the person’s commitment to these plants, I’m asking that they pay 2,000 F for about a kilogram, which is half of what I paid in Bamenda. It would be nice to find farms with fences in place so that we can protect the mucuna from goats as it is being established, but I’m not going to be such a stickler on this point. One of our farmer partners has already stepped up and planted his seeds this past weekend, but finding a second is taking a little more effort. With the dry season approaching, I’d like to get these seeds in the ground as soon as possible so that they can be well established before they have to deal with that stress. I’m excited to see how this little project pans out and will certainly give updates as things develop.

Here, There, Yaoundé

   This past week I started a little trip to Bamenda on Tuesday in order to meet with Philip and plan out our next steps following the completion of the field visits. We are hoping to start organizing regular training sessions with each of our farmer groups and we also needed to discuss how we are going to handle delivering advances to our farmers. Advances are a standard part of doing business here and I’ll take some time to describe what we end up doing with that after I’ve had a chance to see it myself.

First things first upon arriving home.

   I was planning on traveling back to Oku on Thursday, but Wednesday night I received a text from Pierre telling me that there was an inspector from our certifying agency passing through Yaoundé in the next day or two. Funnily, about one year ago, when I first came to Cameroon I had a very similar experience: my boss calling from another country with a sudden assignment to head to Yaoundé for some kind of meeting. This time the pace was a lot more leisurely and I didn’t take a night bus (which I actually refuse to do now), but in both cases I didn’t pack nearly enough pants (this time two would have sufficed, oh well). 

   So I got to Yaoundé on Friday and the inspector (Teresa) and I arranged to meet in the evening. In the afternoon I checked in to my hotel, organized my thoughts and the questions I wanted to ask later that night, then took a nice walk around the city to stretch out after the bus ride and get some dinner (grilled fish, good city food). After that I went to meet Teresa, so not a ton of time for sightseeing, unfortunately.

   Our meeting was essentially a very pleasant conversation about what we have accomplished so far as an Internal Control System (ICS), what work we still have to accomplish, and Teresa’s opinions and advice on some of the less obvious problems that present themselves to people like us. As we spoke, I got a familiar feeling of anticipation and apprehension that I think is pretty much identical to the feeling I used to get at the start of every college semester when the professors would present the syllabi and I’d look forward to all the information we’d cover but also wonder how I’d get all the assignments done in time. At least there are no $150 textbooks to buy in this case.

   On the side of being encouraging, it seems like the field visits were done well. We collected the right sorts of information and we were getting them done at a pretty good pace (45-90 minutes, about the same time we’ll expect to use for our Internal Inspections). Similarly, the spatial distribution of our farms doesn’t seem to be any problem. I had been worried that we might be spreading a little far for our small staff, but Teresa’s experience tells her we shouldn’t worry about it. In all, it seems that we have a good jump on much of the documentation and organization we need to have in place.

   On the other hand, it seems that almost nothing we have started could be considered complete at this point. Frustratingly, it may be the case that these are the sorts of things that are never completed; rather, they are amended and refined for as long as the program is in place, dangerous for someone with a perfectionist streak. Looked at it a different way this is freeing; we can leave some pieces only partially formed and let time and circumstance complete them later. For example, Teresa and I agreed that we can simply leave our ‘Allowed Input’ list blank at the start as there are no purchased inputs our farmers are in the habit of using that aren’t strictly prohibited.

   The most distressing revelation is that Teresa does not regard our strategy of encouraging farmers to change part of their production to organic and keep part as conventional (a way to hedge the bet) as wise from a certification standpoint. It seems like we may have to return to quite a few farmers to encourage them to convert all of their holdings or maybe find another place to process their inorganic coffee. In any case, this part won’t be fun for me as it will mean I need to reverse something I said earlier.  When the time comes to talk about this, I certainly hope I have something positive to bring to the table at the same time.

   Finally, our discussion changed my perception of the relationship between our ICS, the farmers, and our certifier. If there are two major responsibilities between those parties, (1) ensuring the farms are up to the organic standard and (2) ensuring that the farms are well monitored and evaluated, I had seen those responsibilities mostly resting on the ICS and the certifier, respectively. In the last few days, the responsibilities migrated down the chain so that it is really in the hands of the farmers to keep their farms up to snuff and in our hands to watch and evaluate them, with just occasional oversight from the certifier. The ICS will be ready for that second shift, but I think some of our farmers would agree with my old view on the first. Remember, no coffee farmers in Oku asked for someone to come along and certify them as organic growers. It is important that our staff is on the same page and very clear about the expectations a farmer is going to be held to and in the next few weeks we’ll be separating the true believers from the opportunists.