Category Archives for Co-op’s

Arabica; From it’s origin to extinction

An interesting lecture from 2013 SCAA Symposium by Aaron Davis; a botanis.

Screen shot 2013-05-29 at 8.41.48 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pr5Iis_J6-U#!

It is focused on the issue of arabica being a very small part of the wild coffee species in Africa, and due to climate change, why it is looking like it might be tough to continue current growing practices to produce arabica.

Of all the coffee grown outside of Africa, there is less than 1% of genetic variance; compared to the species growing in Ethiopia !!

Lack of genetic variance is partly why leaf rust is such a problem for the industry.

Water and coffee: the water footprint of coffee

Water plays an important role in coffee, making up most of the beverige, and there are a few big issues involved with coffee, starting at origin with growing, processing, and at the brewing stage with quality of water effecting flavours in different ways, and scaling up espresso machines..

What I wasn’t so aware of is, as I drink my V60 Harar, I am also unknowingly using 100’s of liters of their precious water!

water collection Africa

According to this study waterfootprint.org for every cup of coffee we drink, 140 liters of water is required to grow and produce it!! 99.66% of this water is for growing, with only 0.34% accounting for wet processing.

Origins like Harar, where rainfall is so scarse they don’t wash any coffee, this issue is particularly big, to think for each cup of coffee we drink, 140L of clean rain water went into coffee trees- and not to people!

When a product is exported there is resources used to produce it, ‘Virtual water’ is water used to grow a product which is then exported, depleting the origin of this resource and product.

We all consume water, The water levels on the planet will stay the same, but where it falls, how its used, and how polluted it is when we try to consume it is a different story.

This may sound a bit academic, but really we have a similer situation here in NZ with huge dairy production for milk powder export using mass water for irrigation etc, with water shortages are becoming more common. Seventy percent of New Zealand’s irrigated land is in Canterbury, where two big irrigated dairy farms can use more water than the whole city of Christchurch.

Estimates by the NZ Water Rights Trust state at least 500 litres of water is needed to produce a single litre of milk—possibly much more. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation puts the ‘water footprint’ of a dollar’s worth of milk at 1,470 litres.

Water stress is a reasonably now concept, it is when the annual water supplies drop below 1,700 cubic metres per person per year, and is occurring in many places these days when 50 years ago it was commonly believed clean water was an infinite resource.

Water Justice: as the research points out, when talking about water problems in coffee, there is a much bigger and separate topic than pollution of rivers through processing, or scale building up in espresso machines, as we are essentially exporting water out of coffee origins, at over 100L per cup of coffee.

As far as I know, small lot farmers who we buy from, the water used in growing the coffee is all rain fall. But for larger plantation, water irrigation for growing may be happening, perhaps mainly in robusta and commodity coffee, where farming is more extensive and mechanized.

What this means for coffee farmers, ‘virtual water export’ is obviously hard to quantify, this issue is common to all products, but has different effects with some many factors in different countries. But regardless it is a real issue which we play a role in.

What role can we play: perhaps part of our responsibility from the “developed world” is to promote, share and support the use of technology and its management.

This is happening through the co-op mechanism using farmers shared resources to build facilities for cleaning water. But it is still not common place among our co-ops, as many farmers have backyard micro wet mills.

So this is really quite a big picture problem, with no answer to how to change where rain falls, or where products are grow, but never the less, an interesting topic.

Colombian CENCOIC organic production issues:

During the SCAA 2012, Justin from TAI (coffee buyer from Trade Aid Importers) and I talked with Ricardo from CENCOIC, our Colombian co-op about some issues they are having with organic production. The soil of the Cauca region is deficient in nitrogen and sulphates, (among other things) and fertilizers must be used in coffee production.

Recently the co-op went through some changes and now has quite a different member make up, because of this they lost their organic cert (as most new farmers didn’t have cert), and only can ship a very small amount of organic coffee.

Later Ewan from TAI (Ewan is coffee quality person from TAI) spoke with me to see if we would be interested in buying un-organic coffee for a time while they gain their cert again.

There is a thing called Transitional coffee, it takes 3 year to transition from chemicals to organic, starting from the day you stop using chemicals. One school of thought is it is a good thing (for a roaster) to buy transitional coffee, esp if you start working your way up to the organic premium (say an extra 5c per pound each year), as farmers have to do all the extra work (it is a LOT) without getting $ reward till 3 years is up and cert is achieved.

We need organic coffee and it is much harder to produce, we need to be helping farmers transition to meet our market.

I think organic is a big part of our brand, so wouldn’t want to be 95% organic, whats the point.

However this may mean we will stop buying for a co-op we have been trading with for years, having a big impact on them, and (arguably) reducing the incentive for them to transition.

I’m not sure where this will go, I don’t think we will change our 100% organic stance, but food for thought as this may necessitate the need to find a new co-op which meets both TAI and our requirements.

René

Do Micro Lots matter to Producers

Remarks from the SCAA lecture about ML’s

On the pannel there was a spead of industry people; co-op members, brokers, roasters, researchers.

+if you only buy a ML from a producer and not their normal harvest this is NOT seen as good practice in “relationship trade” (by some producers) its like only going out for dinner with a friend when they are shouting dinner.

+Skimming the best out, on the whole doesn’t greatly reduce the quality of the main harvest, rather- that the good quality beans are missed in the cup when left in normal harvest, so skimming can be a good way of achieving a special lot, esp when already harvested or harvest special lots at “optimum picking time”.

+Farmers (from CENFROCAFE in Peru) who attained a ML once never received it again, seemed like luck to them. This brought about big disappointment. They have often had to re-blend ML’s back into normal coffee as they had no buyers. It was mentioned that farmers (in private) like the idea of ML’s- its the co-op who mainly talk about jealousy among producers.

+In peru, ML are seen as a seperate business, requires farmer to file tax return (which the co-op would normaly do) this is also on a higher tax code and rate, and requires accountant. Also land lots which have produced ML’s are seen as more valuable so land tax and value go up too.

+everyone wants to taste samples of ML’s, but few actually buy.

+Roasters are creating (perceived) demand for ML’s, not lead by customers or market.

+ML’s can be useful for producers to develop a “new” flavour profile to meet a market, and apply these agronomic practices to main crop. (To me this seems like the best role of ML’s -develop best practice at micro level, test it on market, and roll out macro level if successful)

+There is a need to increase confidence between producers and roasters, conducting dialog and questions around adding value and ways to make ML’s work for farmers is very important as ML’s increase in trade.

Peoples Coffee has held off from pushing for ML’s from our producers due to the feedback we get when raising this topic. It is a lot of extra work for farmers and the co-op to produce, and outside of the COE auction system- it’s hard to find buyers to pay what the farmers would like to receive for all the extra work.

However some of our producers are now offering special lots which may be skimmed or ML’s, which we will be receiving later in the year !! (july 2012??)

I think it is more beneficial to raise quality of total harvest, rather than focus on ML’s which only see a few mouths. Then, when we talk about quality it is relating to our bread and butter coffee, not the ML’s which make up 0.1% of business. This issue is frustrating when other roasterys talk about buying the highest quality coffee for high prices, but it only relates to 0.1% of their business as ML’s. (Stumptown is often mentioned in this capacity)

René