Today was 'Dia de Campesino' at Beatrice's school in Boquete.  This is the day of the farmer.   A day of folk dancing, traditional songs and foods.   In this little Agricultural coffee farming town, this day is celebrated in all the schools sometime around the end of September.  Most people here are farmers or sons or daughters of farmers.

I like the folk dancing here in Chiriqui very much as it is similar to Scottish Country dancing.   They both have Gaelic roots.  Here in Panama the folk dancing is less energetic and there is more, much much more,  wiggling of hips and swooshing of skirts   - but that about sums up the difference between Northern Europe and Latin America in general.  Also, instead of tartan, the girls wear beautiful brightly colored cotton prints with small flowers.

The big surprise today for me, and another British mum who came to watch, was that the May Pole is one of the traditional dances of Panama.  It comes from Bocas Del Toro and is  in the Carribean tradition which was greatly influenced by the UK as well.    So, if you thought there was nothing more English than dancing the May Pole - think again.   

Down under the coffee bushes was not a bad place to be on an unusually hot day in the rainy season.   I learned a bit about pruning and a greater appreciation that coffee farming is really gardening.  Yes, taking care of every single plant as you would in a garden.     Every unproductive branch is draining the plant of energy for cherries and sucking up fertilizer.

There are few greater pleasures in life than visiting the farm where one of your favorite coffees is grown.  Today, I had that experience.  It was a  spectacular farm, nestled in a beautiful quiet valley, with gorgeous trees and views.  The original house where my host was born, still had remains of its once magnificent garden.  There were fabulous old roses, 20-30ft camelia trees and some wonderful fruit trees including apples, grapefruit, naranjillo, cherimoya and one I have never even seen before but had little pumpkin-like cherries.

This farm is  managed by a lady from a traditional coffee growing family who is also a co-owner.  The farm is planted with Typica coffee.  I have of late decided that for me this is the ultimate morning cup of coffee.  There is something very good indeed about the typica varietal.  It has everything flavor wise I am looking for, without blowing your mouth away - it is subtle and refined.   It an old fashioned varietal that lost popularity as it is not as high yielding as some of the more modern hybrids.  Also, it grows into very tall coffee trees that are too high for the Indigenous to pick without ladders and more expensive to pay the Indigenous to pick where the yields are lower and it is tougher to reach the cherries as they are paid by lata - which is a volume picked measurement.   I love it so much, I am planting it on my own farm.  Delicious.

Here are some pictures of the farm and the gardens.  Thank you Lourdes!

With the building work nearly complete, very soon we will be welcoming an extended Indigenous family onto the farm.  For the next 3-4 months while we pick the coffee, we will have the whole family here.  

Then around February, the family will head back to the Comarca (the reservation) leaving behind just one of the men folk who will work here full time caring for the coffee plants.

My limited experience confirms that I  need house rules.  The last time we had an Indigenous lady and her family here they ate me out of house and home - literally, the wildlife was much depleted and here were never any fruits or vegetables for supper when I wanted them.  Also, litter was a big problem.

The Indigenous are Noble Bugle indians.   So far the ones on the farm have not spoken any Spanish so some of the rules and concepts may be difficult - I do not think there are even words in this language for many of the things I want to say: For example, Wildlife, re-cycling, broken.  

Anyway, here goes this is my first draft, ready for review with folks who have more experience than I do over the coming week before everyone moves in:

1.  No killing or eating wildlife. In particular, armadillo, agouti and coati mundi or any birds.  No taking farm chickens or other livestock.  Squirrels and poisonous snakes are the exception, you can kill as many as you want.

2. No litter on the farm.  Trash is dealt with in three different ways:
a.  Compost, biodegradable food scraps can go in the large compost bins next to the Campo.
b. We re-cycle (this is going to be one of the hardest rules to implement).  I will provide bins for re-cycling and remove it every Friday.  Plastics, cartons, paper products, glass and tin can all be re-cycled.  Please wash and keep these separate from each other.  
c. Things that can not be re-cycled - like polystyrene, plastic wrap,  meat scraps, diapers etc go in black plastic bags that I will provide and must be taken to the end of the drive and put in the basura for collection.
 
3.  After the working day ends around 4pm and before around 7am when the working day starts, there is to be no walking around the farm, my house or garden.  Also, on Sundays.  Only in the area of the Campo inside the fence and driveway if you need to leave the farm.

4. Everyone is to be on the farm in the Campo by mid-night.    I do not want anyone walking down the driveway after this time.   You might be mistaken for a burglar.    

5.No visitors without my prior permission.  It is very important that I know and recognize everyone on this farm for all of our security.

6. No drinking or drunk persons on the farm.  Also, no fighting with people or animal fights.

7. No fires on the farm.  No burning wood from the farm or lighting fires inside or outside the campo.  There is a lot of cut grass and dry wood around and especially in the dry season we could have big problem with fire spreading.

8. You are welcome to as many bananas, oranges, avocado and guava as you want for your own consumption.   Otherwise, no crops of the farm should leave farm, unless to be sold by the farm.  You can eat the chaoti.  Do not take the small specialty crops that are mainly grown for the casa - eg, tree beans, strawberry guava, strawberries, cherimoya, blackberries, mandarin, passion fruit or anything in the greenhouse. 

6. If anything in the campo does not work properly or breaks you are to inform me.  I will repair those things and would like to know.

Orange farming  is a form of charity.    Orange related activities do provide work for pickers and in due course for anyone who trims or fertilizes the plants.   It is good honest, fairly pleasant work for a surprising number of people for quite a surprising number of days.   I get to watch it happen and open my wallet - so, I think the best way of looking at this is to smile, relax and call it charitable giving.    Today, my charitable giving orange style was concluded for a little while as the last of those sacks was taken off the farm this fine Sunday morning.

I will in the end make an orange loss once I have cared for the trees.  Right now we have just sold the second or third batch this year, I loose count.  It was the biggest take of the year around 15K oranges.    The surplus between sales and picking costs contributed to cash flow  approximately the value of a couple of nice lunches in Boquete for Beatrice and myself in town. 

Want to know when it really hurt?:  I was unable to persuade Beatrice against the idea of a $2 and something orange juice in the Panamonte with her fancy lunch..... which is 50 cents more than I got for selling one hundred small oranges this week, never mind picking costs.  Probably, the same oranges that are being juiced all over town and sold in restaurants for good prices.   Ooooch.   The poor girl is getting orange juice in her packed lunches every day and I think a strawberry smoothie would have been a much better choice.   Oh well, at least someone in the family is still in love with orange juice.

Well, not quite.   We had a meeting on site here today.  Pastor Juan, the foreman needed to re-assure and encourage his congregation,the workers, to keep digging.   The septic tank is enormous and the existing hole is not big enough and the terrain very rocky, making digging hard hard work.  The picture is of one of the workers next to the tank, one of the workers who was really hoping it would be sent back for a smaller one.

This fact  was becoming obvious to me about a week ago.  The workers were hoping Pastor Juan would send back the very large septic tank and order a smaller one......but no, we are keeping the thing - there is some more hard digging to be done.

Pastor Juan is a Renaissance man.   My primary business relationship is working with Juan as a coffee consultant and guru.  He is knows everything there is to know about coffee but with a business perspective and a willingness to consult and share that is hard to ask as a favor from established farmers (who are busy farming and do not want or need to earn money by consulting as well).  

He also fixes  computers in town, being immensely popular with the Gringo retired community as he is very reliable and extremely honest as well as being a genius .  Being a genius is actually quite a challenge for a Godly man,  as in order to use all these talents that are God given and must be used, means that the days are rarely long enough.   

As this is a group of serious church goers, Sunday seems to be their busiest and most exhausting day of the week.   Today, is Saturday, so they are all gearing up now for the service tomorrow and will probably arrive on Monday a little tired although I am sure spiritually re-invigorated to dig the hole!

We have started harvesting.  Yesterday we took off 12 latas from the farm and today a bit more.     In about two weeks we will be ready to pick more again.   These are still low quality first cherries that are going to the beneficio.    Peak harvest will probably be end Nov-around Christmas time.

The weather has been unusually warm this year and the cherries are ripening up much earlier than normal all across the Valley.   This is very early for Boquete and we have a looming problem.  Our pickers are Indigenous and come from the Comarca - which are the lands owned by the Indigenous.     Usually, the men come first and scout out where the family will work.  Which farms have good accommodation and good work etc.  Then the ladies and the children come and the ladies help to pick.  

This year the problem is that the harvest is starting before the kids finish their school term  in the Comarca.   So the ladies and the children will not be here soon enough and their labor is very important.   This is a nightmare.  Beatrice and I may be out there picking coffee - any one fancy a coffee picking holiday around Thanksgiving?

Three men for four days at the rate of about 3000 oranges a day or more.   Orange picking is a fairly gentlemanly occupation, it involves prodding the tree with a stick, shaking things a little and maybe climbing a branch or two.  They are easy climbers.   The oranges are collected in little piles all over the farm, then moved into bigger piles, then sorted for size and put into bags.

The economics of orange growing are a joke, I think if I fertilize and trim the trees, I would loose money.   Which I probably will!  I'll net a couple of hundred dollars after picking costs.     Mainly, I want to get them out before they drop on the soil - each one is an acid bomb.

Who does not love roses? Building rose gardens here in Boquete, Panama.   I'm bringing on old fashioned varieties in the greenhouse which I think will do well here in the tropics as well as some knockout that should be robust here.     Looking forward to many happy times growing roses under the tropical sun. 

  

Let me start by saying, I am not an expert and I do not have full information at this point and welcome input.  I will definitely be updating this topic in the future.   I am a newbie in the coffee world.   Also, an oddity as not too many farmers owning <12 Hectares of coffee (except in Boquete Panama perhaps) have computers, tweet and regularly visit coffee shops in the US and Europe.  

Traditionally, most people who make their living on farms of this very small size are very poor, have never traveled, do not speak English and do not have a computer.  And that is how it will stay if these certification programs take root: At least that is how it looks to me.  Please call me a liar, I do not want to believe this myself, it sounds so good and the intentions so genuine and simple.   But, has anyone considered the small guy - I doubt it.

So, mostly, I have a growing unease around the ethics of 'green' certification programs for coffee.  They are important, my own family members insist on them.  My step-sons say it is critical for me.  Whole Foods Markets (A high end grocer in USA) coffee shelves are stuffed with product smothered in the blessed things.  My twitter feed is full of  reminders to only buy Sealed in Your cup.   The consumer in me is taking notice.   

So is the coffee farmer, and it looks really different from a small farmers point of view.  It feels like these organizations are creating an industry in regulation with certification costs associated with that.    They are only cost effective for big players, big importers or big exporters, and so only the big boys benefit from the marketing advantage.   The small guys stay poor, they can not buy into them to sell directly to the consumer.   Frankly, it feels like a flat tax and how many of my readers here honestly support flat taxes?

If they actually work, and consumers only buy these, then the taste of coffee will suffer quite a bit as well.  This is because some of the best coffee is often the coffee produced by small farms.   Right now consumers are hardly ever getting to taste them on their own, vs in a blend.    If they are basically not able to market their coffee direct themselves the consumer rarely will.  Sometimes, a trendy roaster will buy this small farms coffee and put it up for sale - but the margin associated with the certification will stay with the buyer roaster, the small farmer will stay poor.

Perhaps, most importantly, I think the average consumer has no idea about the coffee industry, no idea that in supporting these labels they are supporting big companies at the cost and maybe extinction of small farms!   Certainly, their voice is never heard.  In context, a $500 annual membership fee for a certification program (never mind cost of getting it in the first place) is very significant in the land where a subsistence farmer could be living on $3000 a year or less.

At least in Panama, small farms are disappearing rapidly as anything other than a piece of family history jointly supported by siblings, a part time thing to be worked on weekends or as retirement or second home properties to folks who are not depending on them for feeding families.   

Small farms mostly sell cherries to beneficios - this is a cyclical market.  This year it is very good, but future years probably not.  Sooner or later they owe the bank too much money or someone comes along to buy the land for development.   The coffee cherry market  is  a commodity market not a quality one.  ie. no incentive here for any environmentally friendly practices at all.  For example, using herbicide is much cheaper than paying labor to clear weeds under coffee.   For these farms, the certifications have no influence whatsoever, they are incapable of making a difference here.      Beneficios do not ask you at the door if you use pesticides or not.   Having said that, many small farmers are so cash strapped that their farms are organic by default, they are 'certifiable', but they will never get the credit for this in the market.  

For small farmers, those who can not make enough volume to turn small margins into large profits at the green bean stage: The only way to guarantee a good year is to sell your roasted beans directly.    The obstacles for small farmers getting into the roasted bean business are many:
-  Manage a cash flow and be able to pay workers (especially pickers)  before they sell roasted coffee around 6 months later.  Most live week to week let alone being able to fund 6 months of business activities out of cash on hand.
-  Invest in machinery for processing and roasting which in the long run is cheaper than renting it.  There are now micro processing machines available but for most they are still too expensive.   
- Know how to market to consumers and retailers.  Unfortunately, most small farmers are not on the internet, do not speak the consumers language and do not understand how to do this.  
- Figure out how to export.   Distribution costs are high for small volumes.  How to share containers, or even posting bags at a time through the mail and to do this quickly enough to ensure fresh product.


BUT perhaps this is changing.    Many of these farms, like mine, have already moved on from being subsistence farms.   The world is getting smaller and certainly in Panama we can do this internet thing.  + There is growing interest from the consumer in understanding exactly where their coffee comes from.  They want to taste terroir, varietal and so on.  

One last thing: The FAIR TRADE label.  This one is supposed to reassure the consumer the farmer is being paid a fair price.   I do not think there is any Fair Trade presence in Panama (Let me know if I am wrong).   In any event, the farmer could still be shafting his workers and pickers.  In the end though, Fair Trade is a poor substitute and  really not the same thing at all, as being given a fair crack of the whip at making the higher margins associated with exporting well priced roasted coffee and selling it to consumers.

I would like credit for running a bird friendly, herbicide, pesticide free farm.   I need it to be cost effective as my farm is currently loss making.   So, guys how can you help me?    Any low rates for people like me.  Sort of like a pensioners or student discount.   The alternative, will be to go direct without and by pass this certification thing.  In the end we can be the ultimate in transparency for the consumer -we are the farm after all, come visit us.  We have an address with coffee plants on it and an airport near by.



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