Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Compost



Yesterday, I took a little break from the coffee buying rush to spend some time with one of our growers and their compost pile. This farmer and her husband let me tag along at the beginning of December when they were making a compost pile. The special ingredient in this particular pile was coffee chaffs, the leftovers of the pulping process, which was a bonus for me being the local coffee guy, but really I was just interested in seeing how one of the more savvy growers in the area views and executes compost production. I did need to bring up the process of turning the pile myself and frame it as a special request that we should do it, because otherwise this farmer would have been happy to leave the pile as it was and add what she got to her farm in a few more weeks.

During that first round of compost making we used a ‘lasagna’ method. This starts with a layer of sticks, branches, or whole corn stalks that aren’t going to break down too readily and will give some airspace at the base of the pile to provide some aeration. On this we placed layers of grass, coffee chaffs, goat dung, fresh weeds, and soil (respectively) which we repeated two times. We also added some urine for good measure and to provide some nitrogen and moisture off the bat. The process went pretty quickly and none of the steps took a lot of effort, which was partly because the pile was not very big, and that helps to make the process less tedious.

I’ve played with composting a little bit in the past and I have a pretty good understanding of the basics of the process, much of which I formally learned from Steve Solomon’s Organic Gardener's Composting. In reality though, while I can talk a good game, I’ve never made a real earnest attempt to make a good pile (never living in one apartment for more than 2-years at a time can kind of keep ambitions like that in check), so I’m happy to get to do work like this where I am tagging along with someone else’s project that I can check in on from time to time and know that they’ll be there to continue it if they choose.

That being said, I wasn’t sure what kind of compost this pile was going to produce. In my mind, having all the ingredients of compost well mixed seems important and this layering method, while easy to teach, would keep the ingredients segregated. When we started turning the pile yesterday, the top layer of grass (directly under a thin layer of goat dung) was pretty much untouched by the decomposition process, which seemed to confirm my suspicions, but as we got past that first grass layer the next 15 cm or so was well on its way towards becoming stable humus, so much so that I could understand why a person would feel like the product of the first round could be added to their farm. I’m hopeful that after this next round the change will be perceptible enough that it will convince the farmer that there is a significant difference between stable humus and the partly decomposed products we were looking at before.

A terrible case of Coffee Berry Disease (CBD)
My ulterior motivation is that I want to have some good compost around for producing compost tea. The idea is to ‘steep’ the compost to extract lots of the nutrients, bacteria, and fungi cultures into a solution of water that you can than apply to your plants as a foliar spray. Compost teas promote plant health by providing nutrients directly to the leaves (reasonably useful) and also by improving the vibrancy of the micro flora and fauna communities in the farm, which can reduce the impact of pathogens on the premise that the non-pathogenic organisms will compete with the bad guys for resources. We want to try applying a tea of this sort to the coffee plants to see if it can have any effect on reducing the dreaded black berry disease that plagues the farmers in this area.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Fewer links this week...disappointing I’m sure



The flip side of the world market is the local market. Here in Oku, we talk a lot about the world market. Farmers ask me very frequently what is going on with the world market or how the world market is affecting the price they are getting for their coffee. This is part of the reason I made myself write last week’s post, so that I would have something to say to them on that point. So far, my line has been essentially what I wrote before: Two bad years for South America raised the price and now an exceptional harvest is putting the price back down, but not so far as it was in the middle of the naughts, so let’s not be too discouraged, especially since demand is consistently outpacing supply lately. This seems to fly pretty well and leaves people satisfied if a little befuddled.

At the start of the buying season (that is early December or so), there was a lot of speculation in Oku. Many freelance buyers were offering prices from 800 to 1,000 F per kg (about $1.50 to $1.90 per pound). My guess is that they were basing their speculation on the prices of the past two years, because in the meanwhile the world market price was already very low, about the same as it is now (around $1.50 per pound), so these guys were setting themselves up for disappointment. In the same period, we hadn’t yet given a price per kilo because we were sitting on our hands waiting for the bigger players in the area (the Cooperative Union and OLAM-CAM) to call the tune and they were similarly dragging their feet, presumably because they didn’t want to open the season with a very low price.

Finally, after much anticipation, the Cooperative Union announced their starting price as 700 F per kg just in time for my return to the country. This signaled to us that we could go ahead and name our price and we did, starting at 725 F per kg. Our line has been that we are trying to get the coffee we need as quickly as possible, which is why we are offering the extra 25 F (which amounts to about $4 per bag of coffee; not nothing) and this is mostly true, but we have the ulterior motive of just wanting to give the farmers growing coffee in Oku the best price they can get without undermining our own business. So now we have some local competition, which is great, and makes the work here kind of exciting. One result of the competition is that the Cooperative Union raised their own price to match our own. I can only assume that this move was spurred by our work because there have been no significant changes in the world market price and from what I’m seeing farmers have been willing to sell, even if they grumble a bit at how the price has dropped since last year.

Weighing in at 85 kg, were he full of coffee, Cassman would fetch $130
You may be wondering why we are taking our cues from the Cooperative Union, when maybe we could afford to offer a higher price for coffee while still doing right by our own company. I’ve wondered the same. But what experience has shown us is that if we do set our own price without consideration for the other buyers in the area we can get ourselves into a heap of trouble both from those other buyers and farmers. Obviously the other buyers aren’t going to appreciate us inflating the local price. While we are buying farmer direct, they are selling onto the world market and thus they wouldn’t be able to match the price we could offer. And while we aren’t buying enough coffee to purchase everything produced in Oku we are buying a significant enough portion that we could severely undermine their business. Doing that could ultimately reduce the competition in the market that has been developing in Oku in the past decade and it is that competition that should support the farmer’s more than anything we can do as a single entity. On the other side of the equation, since we cannot buy all of the coffee in Oku, our inflated price couldn’t be extended to every grower which would lead to undesirable discrepancies in how much one farmer got for his coffee relative to his neighbor. This is a community/social concern. While we don’t necessarily seek to support existing power structures, we also don’t want to wantonly unbalance the egalitarianism that exists between small scale coffee producers here.

I’m certainly not going to claim that this is the perfect approach, and if the last paragraphs ring as me trying to justify something that isn’t quite right...well maybe...but we’re sincerely working on this. One way we are working on it is through the organic certification process. Given the limitations above, the organic certification provides something of an out for coffee pricing. By diverting organic coffee into its own marketing stream where we are the only player we have much more freedom in defining the price without upsetting other local interests (As above, if Cassman were filled with organic coffee he’d get $148, not too shabby). At the same time, we can’t include everyone in the organic program immediately and we still have to deal with that problem of neighborly egalitarianism so we can’t get out of control.