Seasonal

It’s Internal Inspection season again. More accurately, it was the season about three weeks ago and we are wrapping them up right now. This year we inspected 54 farmers, up from 36 last year. As I look at our yield estimates it seems like our strategy for targeting higher producing farmers is paying off some. The 20 farmers that we added this year (two farmers from last year dropped out of the program) have just about doubled our yield estimate over what we brought in last year. They also bring with them a truckload (not a literal truck, but close) of In-Transition coffee that we are going to have to pay a small premium for, but can’t label as Certified Organic. This is a downside of our strategy to target larger farmers. Larger wealthier farmers are more likely to have used agrochemicals in the past few years than the hyper-small scale farmers we were recruiting last year. This means more of their coffee needs to go through an In-Transition period before it can be certified, a necessary ‘evil’.

Around the North-West, the orange flowers signal a change in season

The pace is still below what I was hoping for this year. I can’t quite put my finger on the reason for this. I know I wasn’t breaking my neck doing Field Entry Interviews, but I was moving at about the quickest pace I felt comfortable with. The last thing I wanted was to have too many novice organic farmers to look after and them making mistakes faster than I could catch them. Thankfully, that hasn’t been a problem this year but it certainly could have been and still could; we haven’t really gotten into the height of harvesting season, which is the most ticklish time with the highest potential for mistakes.

It is gratifying to notice that the day to day work has been getting easier with the farmers that have been part of the program for a year or more. No one is quoting the National Organic Practice or anything, but during our training meetings there have been a few occasions where a veteran will explain to greener farmer one of our organic rules that he himself certainly didn’t know ten-months ago. It gives me confidence that as the number of growers in the program expands, the workload won’t grow proportionately. This Inspection period may have been an indication of that as we were able to inspect about 1.5 the number of farms in pretty much the same time period we used last year. We also have our ducks in a much more orderly row for our external inspection that in 2012. So here’s to a round of seasons’ experience.

Are you guys gonna start acting like hipsters soon?

I lived in Ithaca, NY for about two-years between 2009 and 2011. Ithaca is one of those towns where hippies go to retire, finding tree stumps carved into ‘gnome homes’ is common, and a conversation along the lines of :

‘Drinking Kambucha has changed my life.’

 I know, right, I just bought some yesterday and I feel great.’

‘Oh, you buy yours? I make mine from scratch from a mother culture that comes from the highlands of Nepal, so...you know...’

is likely to be overheard in the local grocery cooperative (which I was a member of, by the by).

I’ve been at this organic work here in Cameroon for about 18-months now, and I’m starting to wonder if the people I work with will ever adopt that somewhat separatist/elitist/hipsterish/environmentalist attitude that is so tightly connected to the organic movement in the US. Frankly, it would make my work a lot easier if the farmers who took on the organic title took the organic worldview along with it. As it stands, I can give a list of rules and make sure that they are being followed, but there is still something intangible missing from the culture of our group of farmers.

I’m sure that my own approach to organic production isn’t really helping nurture this sub-culture. My motivation in this endeavor leans more towards the economic (you can get more cash per kilogram of coffee if it is certified) than the environmental. Obviously, I don’t ditch the later but as an illustration of how I straddle that line, last month in our training meetings I discussed weed control, devoting significant time to describing the health hazards associated with herbicide use. At the same time, I couldn’t resist devoting additional time to discussing the safest and most responsible use of chemicals (herbicides included) which did lead a few people to wonder where exactly I stood on herbicide use. (In my defense I made sure to say the exact phrase, ‘Organic growers are never allowed to use chemical herbicides of any kind, ever, without exception’ at least four times in each of those meetings, so I felt like I was being pretty clear).

A different organizer would have probably run those meetings a different way, perhaps ignoring the potential use of chemicals all together and using the training time to try to galvanize farmers’ minds against the idea of herbicides. As I write that sentence, I certainly see merit in that approach, maybe more than I did a month ago, but I just wouldn’t be able to run it that way. The galvanizing approach would probably lead to that organic sub-culture much more quickly than my own hedging method. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to think about how to punch up the status and raison d’etre of organic production, at least in the minds of Oku practitioners.