Wet mills. These are key elements in the coffee landscape. They are the first step into transforming the cherry into a green bean. At the heart, these structures can be relatively simple. They need to receive the cherries, to de-pulp (Some stop here! We won’t get too much into detail with pulped naturals, naturals […]
This is a guest post by Hannah Francis, a Fulbright Scholar working with CRS’ Blue Harvest team in El Salvador this year. Hannah is a soil scientist helping analyze research data from hundreds of coffee farms. This post builds on our recent post called Get Me SOM, and several other posts on soil management on coffee farms. Guest […]
SCAA has just published the Blueprint for Water Security in the Coffeelands as part of its series on critical issues at origin. The Blueprint’s purpose is “to support action by coffee stakeholders committed to increasing water security at origin” I believe the Blueprint can serve as a useful reference for highlighting water-related actions at […]
The Borderlands project took place on two sides of the Colombian – Ecuadorian border. In Nariño we know about the hidden potential to produce high quality Arabica coffees. We’ve shared some of the stories from there previously on this blog. Less than 100 miles away, while the Andes mountains continue tracing the spine of South […]
Last Friday marked 14 years from the day I started at CRS. Yesterday was my last day. For nearly half that time, I have been writing this blog. More than 500 posts. Nearly a half-million words. Over 1,000 comments online and some multiple of that number offline. I want to thank you for reading it, […]
14 years ago Michael Sheridan was assigned to me. I was working in the southern Philippines (Mindanao) for CRS, and Michael came in as a Fellow. He’s called that a “lucky break“, and it was for me. We had this odd organizational hierarchy, where I was his “mentor”, but not his supervisor, while he seemed to […]
Twenty years ago, I was in the Peace Corps in Honduras working on water systems, and one of the biggest lessons from that experience was the conviction that if a community could come together and build their own water system, they could do just about anything. When people in a village or small town can […]
A few weeks ago, some exciting and hopeful news came out of Colombia. You might have missed it, as It was predictably lost in the news cycle which was dominated by the horrific mass shooting in an Orlando night club; the permissive gun laws in the US; the Brexit and its global economic ramifications; the […]
Over the past 18 months (and more), we’ve posted often on the critical role of soils in terms of sustainable coffee production and water resources management. With all we’ve written, if I had to choose one recommendation for improving coffee farm management, it would be this: “Increase Soil Organic Matter” Soil Organic Matter is abbreviated as SOM. […]
Cheers to the coffee world out there. From the consumers to the farmers who grow it, to market participants and NGOs who work to support it… To all of us who live and breathe coffee. I found myself in a meeting a couple weeks ago that took me back to Re:Co Symposium and SCAA Atlanta […]