Author Archives: Kraig Kraft

Matchmaking at the SCA Expo

2018-04-11 Comments Off on Matchmaking at the SCA Expo

It’s Spring again… Green is starting to appear in the northern latitudes, the NBA playoffs are just around the corner, you realize that you haven’t filed your taxes yet, and the annual Specialty Coffee Association’s Expo is coming up.  This year will be my fifth consecutive year attending – I’m starting to feel like a “local,” […]

What water smart coffee milling looks like

2018-03-22 Comments Off on What water smart coffee milling looks like

In the previous few posts, I’ve been writing about our recent work in Nicaragua, improving the water use efficiency and minimizing the pollution from small coffee wet mills. You can see these posts here: Wetmill makeovers! What’s the impact of these mills?  Even better than reading about the impact and the design (more posts coming […]

Saving water with new ecological wet mill designs

2018-03-06 Comments Off on Saving water with new ecological wet mill designs

Back in January, we presented some models of small wet mills that were designed to maximize water use efficiency and to treat waste water that generated by coffee processing.  CRS build these seven model wet mills as part of the Blue Harvest project, funded by Keurig Green Mountain and the Interamerican Development Bank. The original […]

COFFEE WET MILL MAKEOVERS ON THE CHEAP!!

2018-01-24 Comments Off on COFFEE WET MILL MAKEOVERS ON THE CHEAP!!

  The makeover.  The ability to fix flaws and to transform, changing into a better version, the 2.0.  It is a sexy premise – one that feeds tons of industries, catering to our most basic desires for improvement.  What is left out of how these makeovers are presented in the media is how much work […]

Parsing apart the SCA report on farm profitability

2017-11-15 Comments Off on Parsing apart the SCA report on farm profitability

Following the recent Avance coffee sustainability conference held in Guatemala, the SCA released a report that analyzed existing public information about farm profitability and costs. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of reliable cost of production data available to them. Shockingly, the analysts only found nine studies and publications from around the world that they considered […]

Measuring ROI of farm management activities on water resources in the Coffeelands

2017-11-07 Comments Off on Measuring ROI of farm management activities on water resources in the Coffeelands

Measuring how better management of coffee farms improve water resources in the Coffeelands Blue Harvest started as an idea of how to restore and improve the management of water resources in coffee producing areas in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, while increasing the productivity of coffee farms located in our target watersheds.  As we have […]

Farmgate Price: An Important – but Partial – Piece of the Sustainability Puzzle

2017-09-19 Comments Off on Farmgate Price: An Important – but Partial – Piece of the Sustainability Puzzle

In March, I wrote about my reaction to Kickapoo Coffee publishing a minimum FOB price for all their coffees. That article focused on Kickapoo and other efforts to make pricing more transparent – an aspect of the specialty coffee business that can be quite murky. I had 3 takeaways of things that I liked about […]

Robusta farmers rewarded for quality in the 2nd Taza Dorada

2017-08-29 Comments Off on Robusta farmers rewarded for quality in the 2nd Taza Dorada

The Coffeelands blogs suffers from a few coffee prejudices, which we readily admit to.  Our geographical base is in Central America and therefore our coverage tends to be towards issues that are of great concern in this part of the world.  We’re unabashedly Arabica centric as well.  You’ll find it in our daily drink and […]

Celebrating the public launch of the Spanish language Water Smart Agriculture blog by CRS – Agua Verde

2017-08-02 Comments Off on Celebrating the public launch of the Spanish language Water Smart Agriculture blog by CRS – Agua Verde

One of the biggest deficiencies of the Coffeelands blog is that we have only published in English to a broad, sector wide audience.  We here at the blog report, analyze and opine on issues relevant to origin (with a very Latin-American centric perspective due to where we are all based); yet when these same discussions […]

Thoughts on the UTZ and Rainforest Alliance Merger

2017-06-21 Comments Off on Thoughts on the UTZ and Rainforest Alliance Merger

Over the past 36 months, the coffee industry has seen a wave of consolidations roll through the retail/manufacturing sector and those of us on the sidelines have been trying to figure out what it all means (see Sara Morrocchi’s great talk at Re:co Dublin last year). While some argued that consolidation was going to be […]