Category: Miscellanea

Cacao Agroforestry Systems – A Cost Benefit Analysis

2021-02-26 Dan Barthmaier Comments Off

Building on Dan McQuillan’s Coffeelands Blog series on issues surrounding farm profitability, I want to shift a bit to the world of Cacao and highlight some work coming out of CRS’ Allianza Cacao program in El Salvador. Agroforestry approaches, increasingly promoted globally, present a complex set of challenges for evaluation – with so many interrelated variables, what is the […]

Innovations at Origin: Young Coffee Entrepreneurs

2020-12-30 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

After reading Bloomberg’s article on cost of production and profitability for Guatemalan growers earlier this month, There Is No Money in High-end Coffee for Guatemalan Growers, I was inspired to add a few more posts to last year’s multi-article series on profitability in the Latin American Coffeelands (series begins here). I want to highlight an […]

Moving from Savings Groups to Agroenterprises

2020-12-02 Dan Barthmaier Comments Off

Among the questions posed in the last entry was: What are the best ways to organize farmers and achieve economies of scale? What models outside of cooperatives may be more realistic and sustainable? Contained within the question is whether how a group is formed matters. Does the path to forming a group orientated around a business objective matter? […]

An Expansion of the Coffeelands Blog

2020-11-18 Dan Barthmaier Comments Off

After more than a decade since the inception of the Coffeelands Blog, in 2009, it’s time to take things in a new direction. The formal Coffeelands program has officially come to an end, providing us with natural point for reflection and an inflection point for the blog. As we move forward in our work, what […]

Innovations at Origin: Water Smart Agriculture–Agua y Suelo para la Agricultura (ASA)

2019-06-27 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

In coffee projects around the world, best practices and increasing yields are often the lynchpin in the strategy to improve smallholder´s livelihoods. By definition a smallholder has a small tract of land, so the logic goes, that to compete they need to maximize their production. However, as smallholders know well, maximizing production often means higher […]

Innovative Models at Origin: Can selling coffee in cherry be profitable?

2019-04-05 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

It is often taken as accepted wisdom that smallholders need to move up the value chain–aggregate, process, trade directly—to be competitive and profitable in the coffee industry. Smallholders who aren´t part of a cooperative with certifications, cupping labs, mills, and an export license will never break out of a cycle of intermediation and poverty. This […]

Innovative Models at Origin: A Territorial Approach to Communal Land Management and Income Diversification

2019-03-18 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

Coffee farmers across origin countries search for and develop innovative business, production and management models as they seek out profitable and sustainable livelihood strategies. These interesting and diverse “solutions in process” enjoy varying degrees of success. Sistema Comunitario para el Resguardo y Manejo de la Biodiversidad (SICOBI), whose model is a blend of territorial management, […]

A Case of Two Coffeelands and an Unexpected Conclusion

2019-02-22 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

Although the Mesoamerican Coffeelands (Central America and Southern Mexico) are a relatively compact geographical region, they contain a diversity of coffee production systems—agroecologically and organizationally. CRS has ongoing programming with community groups in Oaxaca (one of whom, SICOBI, will be highlighted in a subsequent post), farmer groups in San Marcos, and groups in Zacapa and […]

Analyzing Farm Profitability: Land Equivalency Ratio and Gross Profit

2019-02-18 Dan McQuillan Comments Off

To address the drivers of migration- debt/prices and climate pressures- highlighted in the last post, we need to consistently seek to gain a deeper understanding of farmer livelihoods. CRS used the Land Equivalency Ratio tool during the last agricultural cycle to analyze the economics of coffee-based agroforestry systems in San Marcos, Guatemala. Land Equivalency Ratio […]

Coffee Futures – Investor Behavior Overwhelms Market Fundamentals

2018-10-23 Paul Hicks Comments Off

Note: This post is an interview with Andrew Sargent, the Director of the CRS Coffeelands Program. Andrew and I have had an intense online discussion over the past month on my series of posts on the “Scandal of the C-Price”. We’ve re-constructed this exchange as a Q&A. It’s a long post, but worth reading to […]