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.