A Get Together

Last week Mocha Joe’s Organic Growers had its first all farmer meeting. Normally, we have monthly meetings in the different villages we operate in on different days, this time we invited all of our farmer partners to a single event to look back at what we’ve accomplished in the last year and what we are planning for the future. At the top, I’ll say the meeting was a success. We got lots of positive feedback from people who were really jazzed up about being a part of our organization. A while ago I wrote about how organic farmers in Oku don’t really have a culture around them and the challenges that presents in communicating the ideals of organic production. This meeting was a step towards creating an organic production community with a distinct culture.

One of the successes was that we had nearly all of our certified organic farmers in attendance (about 46 of 49) as well as some 20 of our close collaborators who aren’t coffee producers (drivers, suppliers, village heads, etc.). Farmers from different villages were surprised to find friends and family that they didn’t realize were part of the organic program in the room. We even had almost all of our farmers from the neighboring village of Mbessa present, something I was very keen on. I’ve never written on this, but over the past decade or so there have been quite a bit of tension between the villages of Oku and Mbessa, mostly stemming from land-disputes that spiraled out of control into violent conflict. The issue is mostly resolved through the intervention of traditional and civil authorities, but relations between the villages are still rather icy. In early discussions of this all-farmer meeting, we even considered holding two separate meetings in each village, but in the end we decided to go ahead with a single gathering for all of our members. The farmers showed us that it was the right choice. From the opening activity (the Human Knot – yup, I got Cameroonian coffee farmers to do the Human Knot) Mbessa and Oku farmers mixed together with no issue at all.

In the vein of creating culture, we dedicated a significant portion of the time to coffee roasting and appreciation. Though coffee cultivation is as normal as breathing in Oku and Mbessa, consuming coffee is an exotic concept. Our plan, which I’m not sure we totally accomplished, was to show that roasting coffee can be a very simple process that any person can do with the materials they already have in their homes: aluminum pots, a glass bottle for removing the coffee hull, and some small cups and spoons for measuring. It didn’t quite work that way because instead of just doing a simple demonstration of roasting a small bit coffee we actually roasted all the coffee we needed to serve about 80 people all at once. Most of that coffee should have been pre-made, but a comedy of errors in the 24-hours or so leading up to the event kept that from happening (standard operating procedure, really), so as a group we probably looked like a bunch of headless chickens, hulling coffee, sorting beans, and roasting in both the aluminum pots and our fancy-pants sample roaster in a mad rush to get the beans brewing before lunch. This one is going to require some follow-up if I want the lesson to stick, but I’ve already made a few dates for doing individual home roasting demonstrations in the next month or so.

The meeting also featured the introduction of Jude, my soon-to-be replacement as Director of Organic Certification, to the community, a few words of encouragement from Pierre (the owner of Mocha Joe’s who is currently visiting from the US, more on that later), and a surprisingly dignified distribution of Organic Certificates. We apparently managed to make it all look easy, because many people said we should be having this sort of meeting twice a year. We’ll take it under consideration.