We're Pretty Darn Close...

Last week we were visited by our external auditors, EcoCert. They sent a team of two people: Jean-Pierre, whom I mentioned before as the man who would be acting as our primary inspectors, and Aziz, the manager of the EcoCert office in Burkina Faso who was really more interested in observing the work of JP than us, but also contributed some questions here and there.

It was a three and a half day event that saw me move back and forth from Oku to Bamenda a few times, which is a blast. The end result is that we are technically denied right now, pending some changes we need to make, none of which should be terribly difficult for us (mostly questions of documentation). The most obtrusive is that we need to make an effort to prove that our farmers have actually undergone the three year transition period which is a pre-requisite for producing a certified product. There is a precedent that a farmer can use the three years prior to when they apply for certification as this conversion period if they can provide sufficient evidence that they did not use any unallowed chemicals. In our situation, since our farmers are not in the habit of keeping records, we are going to rely on their formal attestation of their field history backed up by an assurance from the local Chief of the Agricultural Post (the Cameroon equivalent of a state extension agent in the US) that their statement is true. Again, precedent is apparently on our side with this. More importantly, as far as I can tell it is the truth that all of our farmers have abstained from using unallowed inputs on the farms we are seeking certification for. It would be a shame that these people would miss out on this opportunity on a technicality.

Throughout our inspection, all of us (me, Philip, Cassman, Gilbert, and the farmers) were impressed by the manner JP and Aziz conducted themselves and their investigation. At the first farm we visited together, JP asked me to perform a ‘mock’ inspection, since we had already done the official one the week before. He observed me and afterward gave me some critiques. Some were positive (and as a testament to his skills as a teacher/manager he started with these) and some were constructively critical. Mostly, he encouraged me to change the way I ask questions in order to open them up and let the farmers explain more to me about how they are managing their farms. Hearing this, I couldn’t help but agree, but also had the thought in my head that maybe that kind of questioning wouldn’t work with these particular farmers. That was a foolish thing for me to think. Over the next two days, JP showed that you can get just about any information you want from a farmer with very simple, very open questions. Something along the lines of, “So how do you take care of your farm?” could lead to about 10 minutes of explanation that would have taken me an hour to pry out of these guys. I’ll be trying to put this into practice more myself and I’ll probably have more to say on it later.

Something else we were impressed by was the responses of our farmer partners. A few times, JP directed a question that made me flinch to one of our farmers, for example, “What have you learned from these people?” Expecting painful silence, I was pleasantly surprised when each time the response came back pretty darn close to something one of us actually said. This not only made us feel great during the inspection, but made us all feel better about the training program we are trying to initiate here and gave us more confidence in the abilities of our partners, an invaluable thing.

In the next week or so we will be rushing about, telling the growers the news and making sure that they have implemented the corrections we gave them during the internal inspections. If they have, then they get to start harvesting their coffee as organic, which is something special. There is still no guarantee that the coffee will actually make it to the US as USDA Certified Organic, which depends on us fulfilling the corrections EcoCert gave us, but we’re ready to take that bet.

Kids These Days

About 2 years after finishing college I was at a party in my hometown with a bunch of people I had gone to highschool with. One buddy I got to speak with had been a solid baseball player while we were in school together and got to keep playing ball through college (cue Springsteen any time). For the last two Springs he was putting in some time as an assistant coach for our alma mater and was having a good time with it. As we spoke, the topic got to how the students on the team just didn’t seem to put in the effort he remembered putting in himself back in the day. To commiserate, I told him about the troubles I was having with the three new, high school aged employees my boss had saddled me with at the greenhouse. It took about five minutes of this venting (bitching?) before one of us used the phrase ‘kids these days.’ Mind you, we were about 24 years old ourselves and even now at the ripe age of 28 I don’t think it’s quite right for me to comment on youth culture as though it were something foreign from me. That being said, I did say something about kids these days a little while ago, talking with some friends here.

These guys were all 30-something Cameroonians with children between the ages of 1 and 10. Honestly, I think their gripe session was doing something a little more “uphill both ways in the snow” than “kids these days”, but it still seems relevant. In either case, both sorts of complaint highlight a difference in generations. Often, this is just a perceived difference based on an idealized view of our own youth (me and my friend fit this I’m sure) but other times it is real (the children of these Cameroonian guys do have access to technology and school/learning materials they themselves didn’t).

This got me thinking, is it just a part of the human condition to see a difference between your own generation and those that follow? Or does there need to be actual cultural differences? If the life of your children is nearly identical to your own life do you still vetch about kids these days? Or is it a symptom of the emergence of an actual youth culture?

I imagine that in 17^th century Europe there probably wasn’t too much disagreement between generations amongst the peasant class. There just wouldn’t have been enough media (music, books, theatre) or it wouldn’t have changed quickly enough to divide generations in a philosophical way. I’d guess that the same has been true here in Oku until very recently. You’ll hear people of all ages describe their culture in the same terms. What you don’t hear is anything about youth culture, counter culture, or underground culture (maybe you could find that in Bamenda). Being the product of my own culture (GenY, maybe?) I have to think that this is an unfortunate lack in Cameroon and one that may be filled in a reasonable amount of time if “kids these days” conversations are any indication.

Which External Auditor is Right for You?

As an internal control system (ICS), we rely on an external auditor to confer on us our legal status and certification for our farmer-partners. The external auditor is the link between us and the USDA, whose approval we are ultimately seeking. Choosing the right auditor is a very important step in the process of becoming a group of certified organic growers.

We just decided this past week on who we would go with after a few months of weighing our options (not that we were lollygagging, just being meticulous). In the end we settled on EcoCert, a company with it’s head office in France and a branch office in Burkina Faso. Maybe the strongest point to recommend EcoCert is that they regularly contract one man (Jean Pierre) as their auditor in Cameroon. JP is a native to the North West Region of Cameroon who currently resides in Douala and works out of Beau. Having our auditor (or at least a man who acts as our auditor’s representative) in country seemed like an invaluable asset. In particular, we felt this would help us to develop a long term relationship with EcoCert; a relationship that has our staff in country at the foundation. With a more remote company, we envision that most of our correspondence would be via email, between their head office (most likely in Europe) and our staff in the US, a chain of communication that would frequently bypass Philip, Cassman, and me.

Proximity was not the only consideration, of course. We expected price to be a large factor, but (surprisingly) the quotes we saw were fairly similar. With one company travel wasn’t included so it seemed lower at first, but with some quick estimations we figured they all came out to just under 3,000 euro. Another factor that weighed heavily in EcoCert’s favor was the company’s responsiveness to our questions during the ‘courting’ phase. Especially given our tight schedule for obtaining certification this year, we were keen on getting an auditor that would be prompt and showed us they understood our urgency and would help us reach our goals.

What didn’t sway us was any company’s reputation or tendency toward being strict or lax in the certification process. This consideration did come up in our internal conversations and we definitely had our biases on who ranked where in this category. In the end, what we decided was that we would hold ourselves to the same standard we imagined that the strictest auditor would expect from us and let whoever we settled on judge us on that. This suits me fine, especially as all the work I’ve done to this point has been based on templates provided by that ‘strictest’ company.

 

Next step: Get JP to Oku to do his thing. We’re through with our internal work in Oku and we’ll be finishing in Mbessa by Friday of this week. After that we’ll be ready for our first test. The idea of being audited has me a little terrified and I guarantee that in the days leading up to it I’ll be having some kind of trouble sleeping. Thank goodness I just got sent a kindle.

Internal Inspections

This week we have been working on the Internal Inspections. These are kind of the crux of what we do as an Internal Control System. The inspections are when we formally review the actions of our farmer-partners in the last year (or since the last inspection) and observe the actual state of the farm. They are also when we write the report that will be formally reviewed by our outside auditor, so we need to put our best face forward and make these things look presentable. Here’s a synopsis of how they go down:

1. The Warning

As you can imagine, there can be some frustrations associated with trying to keep to a relatively tight schedule that relies on farmers being available, but so far things have gone pretty smoothly. A few days ahead of time, I try to be in touch with each grower personally to give them a written notice that we are going to be visiting. This seems to be pretty necessary, and unfortunately it can’t be done too far in advance because not many people keep a calendar and will remember an appointment more than a few days out.

2. The Arrival

We’ve been traveling as a group of four (myself, Philip, Cassman, and Gilbert). I was very keen on having Gilbert and Cassman act as our inspectors, but I don’t think I did a good job of preparing them for the task. When we arrived at the first farm we set Gilbert up as the Inspector. It was clear pretty quickly that he was in a little over his head. Again, I take responsibility for this since the training of the inspectors was my job, and frankly, I have no business training anyone on a task I’ve never performed myself. So after our first visit I took over for the rest of the day and have been acting as the inspector since. As I’ve gotten experience I think I’ll be able to guide other people to being effective/efficient inspectors both through some 'classroom' style exercises and also hands on experience.

Before the actual inspection, we take care of some paperwork. First, we go through the Farmer Contract point by point, answer questions that arise, and get that signed. Next we review the information for the Farm Entry Forms and get the farmers to sign those as well. That is a good springboard into the inspection since the last questions of the Entry Form dovetail with the first questions on the Inspection (i.e. Are your fields the same as last year? and do you keep the same animals as last year?)

3. The Inspection

After the interview stuff is over, we start moving around. We begin with the compound, checking the storage area. Nobody has an area dedicated to organic storage yet, so preparing that (e.g. tidying up and putting a sign saying “Organic Storage Only” on the door) is going to be a condition for everybody this year. I’m glad that we have one universal condition that is pretty simple which can be used as an example for everyone in order to describe what a ‘condition’ is.

I set the date that this particular condition needs to be done as October 31. Kind of arbitrary, but also the earliest I can imagine myself getting back around to check on those things. I’d prefer to get around to check if people have done it before the 31^st because I’m not quite sure how I’ll handle it if farmers blatantly ignore such a simple requirement. I’ve already put one farmer on my bad list (note, this is not an actual physical list) because he told me he had 1 goat when he really had 2 during our initial interview. Probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but his motivation was that he thought I’d be more likely to help him get another goat if I thought he was poorer than he is. Seriously, if you can’t trust a guy to be honest about how many goats he has, what can you trust him with?

Next we head into the fields and take a leisurely stroll with the farmer through all of the coffee fields. As we are treking the inspector is trying to complete the inspection form, or at least take notes that will allow him to complete it later. There are specific questions on the inspection form, but they can be lumped together as: Maintenance (pruning, shade, cleanliness, etc.), Erosion Control, Pests/Diseases, Weed Control, Borders, and Yield Estimate. I think that if an inspector keeps cycling through those 6 categories as they move through the field they’ll see almost anything they need to. You need tricks like this checklist to keep your senses active during an inspection, otherwise you start seeing nothing but a green blur and you're wasting everyone's time. It’s a fun challenge to try to keep yourself as aware as possible, something I used to really love about working in a greenhouse. There, you can use sight, touch, hearing, and sometimes even smell to make sure the plants are happy and healthy and that all the equipment is functioning correctly. In coffee farms, I’ve only figured out how to use sight so far (though smell seems to have it's place). 

Finally, at the end of the stroll, we ask the farmer about the yield of berries at this point relative to last year and try to get a yield estimate. This is a little ticklish since we are essentially asking the farmer how much coffee we should be willing to buy from them at the premium price. I don’t think many people get that, and I feel like we are getting more underestimates than overestimates, so I’m rounding up most of the time. In the end, it will be more important to look at the harvest records the farmers keep in order to know how much coffee we can buy as organic.

4. Paperwork

Later, I take my notes and memories and do my best to complete the Internal Inspection forms. These forms end with me making a recommendation for the farmer to be either approved without conditions, approved with conditions, or not approved. Since we cherry picked farmers from our first review of Oku, I’m finishing every inspection with a recommendation of approval with conditions.

Giant challenge ahead: Making sure those conditions get fulfilled.