Stories from a Caficultor

February 5^th, 2014 

Me and a small group of family and friends had offered Manuel and Carlos our assistance for the day. We were at the micro-mill, which was all but complete except for a few pieces of inessential equipment. An old mustard-yellow Toyota Range Rover had made its way down the windy dirt roads that traverse themselves through the coffee-covered mountainsides of Los Santos and finally ended up at the mill. Its contents were dumped into a holding tank which sat above a giant piece of machinery. The two brothers and business partners in this project, were excited to see through the first truckload of coffee to be wholly processed at their mill. There were two indigenous Panamanian workers manning different stations along the giant de-pulping machine. The machine washed the coffee too, and I was set up to closely watch this section. If the coffee became jammed in the white PVC piping, then I was instructed to add more water. Standing in front of an operating board of controls, Manuel pushed several buttons until they all shone bright red. Small engines began rotating, water began pumping, and the green, yellow, and red machine came to a roaring life. Manuel made his way to each station making small adjustments – he opened some valves and closed others, he strengthened the water pressure at my own station and then he stood back to watch, smiling and proud. He wore a dirty pair of blue jeans that were tucked at the bottom in rubber boots, a blue long-sleave flannel, and a white and blue baseball cap. With sweat dripping down his forehead, his smile slowly diminished into visionary concern. A few of us gathered around him and he began to sing over the sound of the machine.

MANUEL MONTERO:

No I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
no I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
Wake up in the morning throw my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
No I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

You know who that is? C’mon, you know it? [He watches us all stare into the clouds as we pretend to recall the song we knew we had never heard] If you’re American you’ve got to know your history! Look, in the 60s when Dylan wrote that song, something was happening across America. The young generations didn’t want to work the land no more. Well, it’s taken a while, but now that same thing is happening in Costa Rica. It’s very bad, but who can blame them? Growing coffee is hard work. You are here during the best time of year, right in the beginning of the harvest, when the trees are producing. You see all the red cherries waiting to be picked. That’s our livelihood right there, that is our way of survival. It’s exciting at this time of year. It’s still hard work, but it’s beautiful. But come back in June and you will see the meaning of hard work. That is when we have to trim and prune the trees, fertilize the soils, plant the almacigos [coffee seeds planted in a bag of sandy, fertile, soil], and spray for diseases. That is when we have to spend most of our money on fertilizers and chemicals. We don’t use much here on our farms, but we have to use some, or the roya [a disease which turns the leaves into a rusty color and ruins the harvest] will take over and ruin our harvest. And we do all of this for cents. So much money is put into growing coffee, and in the end, we don’t get enough to feed our families. People who drink coffee in the States don’t realize this.

No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
Well he hands you a nickel, he hand you a dime
He asks you with a grin if your having a good time
Then he finds you every time you slam the door
No I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.

Do you see all this? [motions towards the micro-mill in full operation, the thin stretches of coffee laying out to sun-dry, the hills above us lined with coffee trees, and across the valley to the coffee covered mountains] This is my life. I have a house, a beautiful home up on the hill. Beautiful. I didn’t need it. But I built it for my wife. Also, when my daughter was in high school and I saw that she was embarrassed to bring her friends to our old house...she never said anything about it. But I knew. I built my home for my wife and my kids. Gracias a Dios, both of my kids are now working professionals. My wife is in San Jose right now watching over our grandchild. But do you think I have all of this from coffee? No! I have all this because I worked in the States. Thirty years I was working in the restaurants. The cafés in New Jersey pay their cooks well. But does a man choose to leave his home, his family, his land, to work in a foreign country for thirty years? No. I found the opportunity because I had to. I had no choice. You can’t live off of coffee. I wake up at 4 o’ clock every morning to work, and don’t get back from the farm until 6 at night. I work very hard in coffee because I love coffee, but you cannot live off it. And the young people were raised like this. They know it. They know that in coffee, they cannot hope to build a house or educate their kids some day. And so they don’t want to work on Maggie’s farm no more.

And this is not only happening with coffee. It’s happening to growers of other things too. And this is bad because we’re human and we have to eat. But what’s gonna happen when there is no one left to make the food? Ask that to Wall Street [where the international prices for coffee are set] and they won’t have an answer. They can’t see past the heaps of money they make. But I’ll tell you its not gonna be good unless the kids start working that land.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
and if there is no room upon the hill
and if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
Do you know that one? Pink Floyd. I respect these guys for writing about the times. Dylan too. They wrote about how it was. They didn’t hide behind the music, or behind words that don’t mean nothing, they said it how it was. It is a global emergency what’s happening right now, and you wouldn’t now it unless you were right here on the farms. I don’t know where those guys on Wall Street are planning to go when there's no more food. To mars or the moon or somethin. But you can’t grow food on the moon!

Whsssstleup!!! [Manuel whistles to one of his workers to unclog the pile of coffee cherries in the holding tank. He walks away to make more adjustments.

We worked a half-day, starting after Manuel and Carlos and leaving well before they finished up, but it felt like a full day of hard labor. Two days later Joy and I were back working with Manuel at the mill. Every day a truckload of coffee was dropped off around noon, and it would take about 5 hours for it all to be de-pulpeded and washed. In the earlier morning we would lay out the coffee from the day before, which had sat overnight in a small bin to dry. During the day while Manuel and his workers operated the machine, Joy and I rotated the drying coffee and hand-picked the defective beans. In exchange for our work the Montero's took care of us. During the day Manuel would send us to his house where his wife prepared us lunch (even though he ate a packed lunch at the mill). Carlos offered us a light breakfast every morning, dirt cheap lodging, and fresh organic coffee of his own multiple times a day. One night we went up to Manuel's house for beers and more conversations about coffee. We talked for hours on his patio over albums of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Frank Sinatra. I was eager to soak up as much information about coffee as I could. Manuel was very learned and educated in the entire coffee industry unlike many farmers who know only as far as the coffee cherries that are being sold. He brought us into his home and gave a night-time tour. It was nice and spacious, ample even according to North American standards. The whole house was built with a nice polished hardwood - the ceilings, the walls, even the furniture was made with the same wood so that the kitchen table and bookshelves matched the bed frames and lamp stand. It was a shock to see when most of his coffee growing neighbors were living in small, windowless houses with surrogated metal roofing over their head. But then he started talking again and I understood with reverence the significance of his home.]

All the wood you see in this house I planted when I was a teenager. My uncle had some land that wasn't being used, and so I got up every morning, hours before school, and planted some trees. After school I would go back and plant some more before starting work with my father. He was always known as a humble man. My father didn't have much. No money. No land of his own. He worked on other people's land. But he had ten kids and we never went hungry. What my father had to give us could be counted on two fingers. I remember the day, as a little kid of maybe 8 years old, when he pulled me aside from my play, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Son, I'm gonna teach you how to be honest and how to work. If you can be honest and work hard all your life, you'll never be in want." And from that time onward, when I wasn't in school, I was working on the farms with my dad. So by the time I was a teenager, why wouldn't I be planting trees? It wasn't a common thing to see kids my age planting trees, but they never had to think about their future like I did. They knew they would be given land and money from their fathers but what I was given was a hard-working ethic.  Later I moved away to study in the States. After high school I started working in the diners to pay my way through college. Whatever money I had left over I used to buy land back home. I bought my own coffee farms and I bought the land where I had planted all those trees and now I've used the wood to build this home. And there's more of it too. I have enough wood to build homes for my two kids and my grandson too. It was very cheap to build this one because I didn't have to pay for most of the materials. The tile you see we bought years before at a good price, and they sat around for five years until we saved the money to start building. It is a beautiful home and I am very proud, but I didn't like it in the beginning. When it was finished my neighbors refused to come inside. They felt because I had a nice home I was distinguished from them. I guess they forgot I am a coffee farmer just like them. 

My brothers and I, we found opportunity because we were poor growing up. We knew how to work hard and that is why we have what we have. But my neighbors, they were given land but they didn't know how to work it. Little by little, they lost what they had. One neighbor's son is a drug addict. He don't want to work Maggie's land no more and now he's a drug addict. My kids don't work on the farm either, but they found work in other places. They found more secure jobs than growing coffee. But I hope one day they might come back and work the land. I even pray for my grandson to become a coffee farmer! This is why we've built the micro-mill, Carlos and I. We know that our kids and grandkids won't work the land with the prices the Co-ops give for coffee. Big buyers like Starbucks and Seattle's Best don't pay enough for our grandkids to want to work the land. So we start growing specialty coffee. We build a processing plant. We process our own coffee until its green and ready to sell directly to the roasters. When we get better at it and stop having to sell coffee to the coops, maybe then we will be able to survive off of growing coffee. 

[Manuel  said he would teach me the secrets to the green coffee trade. He gave me books and pamphlets published by the United Nations on everything you need to know about coffee exportation. We mapped out the possibility for my return later this year when I could learn hands-on the pre-harvest work of coffee growing. He gave me passion and a vision for my life that I didn't have before.]

Buying Sound Coffee

After writing some previous posts on my coffee experiences here in Costa Rica, I have been contacted by multiple people asking if I could help them buy coffee direct from the farms I had worked on. They had heard my story and the story of the farmers, and they wanted to buy coffee with a story too. To the first few, I was excited to make it happen. Now that my pockets have been cleaned dry of all the coffee (and not without enormous shipping costs), and now that I've moved on with my travels away from its source, my dream role as coffee trader has come to an abrupt end. Along with the real world are exportation fees and transportation costs that make buying direct between the consumer and producer almost impossible unless you plan to pay tenfold.  

I worked with the Montero family who are just beginning their journey producing specialty coffee and selling direct to roasters and coffeehouses in the States. Because they are so new to this, they are onlyshipping right now to one or two coffee roasters in the East Coast. But after doing a little research I found that there is hope for all my friends in California who want to buy coffee with a story.

If you don't already know them, let me introduce you to Verve Coffee Roasters, an amazing coffeehouse based out of Santa Cruz. This link will take you to them, http://www.vervecoffeeroasters.com/collections/latin-america/products/finca-salaca and specifically to a coffee they are selling right now from the same region of Costa Rica that I was in. They have some information about Maria Elena, the grower of the coffee, who is a neighbor and friend of the Montero's. It can be ordered whole bean at $20 a pound, but it's totally worth it and incredibly special to know who you are supporting when you buy it. Because Verve has a direct relationship with Maria and her son, they are able to give them a significant amount of the money you'll spend. There is another coffee roaster in Ontario called Klatch who have a really nice storefront as well. The direct trade they practice is the best that I've seen by far, and they have done a great job in promoting it. They have a lot of Costa Rican coffees right now that you can see here http://www.klatchroasting.com/Cafetal_Honey_p/cos_ric_caf_tal_hon.htm along with detailed descriptions of the coffee's source. Your pound will be a little cheaper at $15, but you'll have the same satisfaction about the 
farmers you are supporting.

For those in Orange County, if your any coffee drinker at all, you must have already heard about Portola Coffee Lab in Costa Mesa. If not, do yourself the favor and make a trip because if you don't, then your not hip. Seriously though, if you can see past the trends you will find some amazing selections of coffee along with various options of how you would like it prepared. You'll find yourself wanting to throw on a lab coat and some goggles (or RayBand glasses) and jump behind the counter for some crazy coffee experiments. The owner himself, Jeff Duggan, realizes that the only way to move coffee forward is through relationships - "One of my favorite things about coffee is the relationships. It is about the farmer whose hand I shake after buying a phenomenal coffee that he worked so hard to produce. It is about the coffee professionals behind Portola Coffee Lab that I geek out with at the roaster, the cupping table, and behind the bar. It is about the curious customer I end up talking her ear off as I take her on a coffee journey from seed to cup. Simply put, coffee is fascinating. It's not just a beverage - it's an experience. As much as we want to dazzle your palates with coffee made great by the hands of many, fews things are more gratifying than sharing our knowledge and experience with others - you - our customer." -Jeff Duggan, Owner http://www.portolacoffeelab.com/index

If your further up in LA then Intelligentsia is undoubtedly one of the best shops to support where you can buy direct trade coffee. They are located in Silverlake, Venice, and Pasadena, and sell their coffee online. Personally, I think they may have won the title for best coffee shop in Southern California years ago, setting the standard for all others that are now booming up. They have trained award winning-barristas who view coffee-making as an art and career - their direct trade practices insure the famers get paid well over international standards. http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/content/history

And finally, to all my friends back home in San Diego, one of my favorite coffeehouses in town is Bird Rock Coffee Roasters. These guys do what no one else in San Diego does - travel the world to build relationships with the people who grow their coffee. http://www.birdrockcoffee.com/ Besides, who doesn't want to escape the inland heat for a drive down La Jolla Boulevard?

So here are some options from coffee shops that I had known already. There is no doubt that many other coffee shops are sprouting up who also pursue direct relationships with coffee producers. Buying direct coffee really is easier than you would think. And when you realize that the quality is so much better for just a little bit more, you are left without a reason, or an excuse, why not to buy sound coffee.

Children of Destiny, Nicaragua - Soon To Be A New Home

Dearest Friends and Family,

As you may have known, I have been traveling throughout Central America for close to five months now with the intent of pursuing whatever opportunities should come my way. I dedicated the first three months to studying Spanish in Costa Rica and then working as an intern for the school. Since then I have been exploring the far reaches of the land – I’ve gone as far south as the Panamanian border and as high as Costa Rica’s tallest peak. I went north to Nicaragua’s capitol were I met my girlfriend, Joy, who decided to join me in the duration of our adventures. Together we have visited palm beaches that line both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and also worked in the mountains at some of the best coffee farms found in this part of the world. Now, we have found yet another amazing opportunity that we would like to share with you.

Months ago we contacted a small orphanage in Jinotega, Nicaragua, called Children of Destiny who have invited Joy and I to join their team as volunteers beginning in March. The ministry is committed to the physical, mental and spiritual growth of 35 children providing food, clothing, shelter and education. Their most important goal as an orphanage is to raise children in a Christian environment where they learn to view life as an adventure, love to learn, become responsible leaders, and develop an awareness of God’s love for their life. The orphanage is located on a small farm where raising animals and growing food is normal part of daily life. While I will be able to alleviate some of the workload on the farm and participate in development projects, Joy will be sharing her spirit with the children through the teaching of music and dance. We are also excited to work together in an afterschool program tutoring the kids in English and other subjects. We feel blessed to be given the opportunity to use the gifts God has given us as a light to children in need and are certain that the following months will be a time of learning and growth for us as well.

The length of our stay is undetermined but we hope to remain with the orphanage for as long as the Lord would have us. We are able to stay as long as our personal funds will allow. Thankfully, the cost to volunteer is very low - once at the orphanage our budget is just fifty dollars a week per person. If you believe in our trip and are within your means, would you please consider sponsoring us? Whether your support gets us through a week or simply one meal, we would be equally grateful to you and for the opportunity to extend our time serving at the orphanage. (If you would like to know more about the orphanage you can find the information online at www.codn.org )

You can send your support using a few different options, online via Paypal or using ground mail. Here is an address where you can reach me:

Jeremiah Idema
31173 Del Rey Rd
Temecula, CA 92591

If you wish to use Paypal you can find a “Donate” link in the right column of this blog which will lead you through some simple and secure steps to giving money online.

Thank you so much for all your love and support. We will continue staying in touch, posting pictures, and updating you with our blogs.

Love, 

Miah and Joy

What Coffeepeople Say About Certifications and Labels

At a hostel I see this book laying on the front counter. I make a mental note. Next day I find a cafeteria owner who will take me to his uncle in the morning, who is a coffee farmer, because I have a pound of organic coffee I want ground. That night I decide to email the author of the fascinating book I had seen earlier. Surprisingly she responds. I plan to buy the book when I return to the States. Next day I make it to the coffee farmers house and see the same book laying next to his small coffee mill. He opens it to page 54 and says, "That is me, Robert Ortiz!" He let's me borrow the book that has made such a peculiar introduction into my life. 

I highly recommend by Rachel Northrop! It is the perfect book to read, little-by-little, beside your cup of morning coffee, and the stories you'll find will make you wonder about the cup sitting next to you. It will teach you more than you've ever known about coffee and voice the lives and thoughts of the producers who make it. You can buy it on the website below for a reasonable price and support Rachel who is currently self-publishing her book. http://whencoffeespeaks.com/

I've dedicated the greater part of three days to quickly make my way through Rachel's book in order to get it back to the original owner, Robert Ortiz, who contributes his voice on page 54. After my own encounter with a coffee growing family from Los Santos, every story in the book jumps out at me. In fact, the famers I worked with know well many of the people included in the book. I wanted to share some of what I've learned from my own experiences and from this book. 

The purpose of Rachel's book is to connect coffee consumers with the people who make it. She is from New York, and has therefore witnessed the current trend in our culture to want to know the source of our food and the push to buy local. Food trends like these have taken root in California as well, and will continue to spread across the country. But the question she had years ago was how do these newfound consumer ethics apply to coffee, a crop that is climatically limited to growing in places very far from the majority of the world's coffee consuming culture? She pursued the literature on the subject to find that there was none. The reality is that we're ignorant about the people who produce our coffee. While there has been an effort to invest in labels such as "Organic", "FairTrade", "Rainforest Alliance", and "Shade-grown," for most people this is as far down the chain their coffee knowledge goes, which I'm finding out, is not very far. This is why Rachel left home - to get closer to the source of our coffee and to record the voices of Coffeepeople throughout Latin America. Instead of returning to write a book filled with secondhand information, she decided to translate and compile hundreds of conversations she had had, and to pass them on to the rest of us in her book. 

Currently half-way through the book, I have learned from coffee growers that labels like "FairTrade" and "Organic" are actually a very shallow and ineffective means of insuring quality coffee and good working conditions. Having worked in coffee for many years, I had heard rumors like this, but never had a complete understanding why these labels can actually be harmful to the farmers who have gone through the trouble, and process of certification, to have them. I am eager to share this information with you because I don't want MY friends buying into the scheme of yet another payed intermediary in the already long chain of coffee production (Remember, the goal of When Coffee Speaks, is to make this chain more transparent between the grower and consumer). First, Fairtrade is a private certification agency which requires farmers to pay $2,000 a year to become and remain certified. It's true that they might be payed a little more for their coffee, that is, if they can find the buyers for it. But this is often not enough to offset the yearly cost of having the certification in the first place. Next, certifications to be "Organic" are also very expensive and time consuming for the famers. The farm must be operated organically for three years before the certification can be applied for. Heaps of extra hard work and care are immediately required when agrochemicals aren't being used, meanwhile, the farmers continue to be payed the same bad price as before. Even after the three years, once the farmer has obtained the certification for his coffee, he is still subject to buyers setting their own prices on it. If they are not agreeable to the farmer, it will be sold at a regular price to the co-op and mixed with all the regular old coffee from around the region. A third-party auditor may come to the farmers land at any time, but they are interested merely in signing off paperwork rather than inspecting the farm or taking soil samples. This means that once a farmer becomes "Organic" there is no guarantee that he stays that way, though the label will (as long as the yearly fees are payed). So when you buy a pound of coffee for $14.40 that is labeled "Organic" or "Fairtrade," you can be certain that a whole lot of other people, from the agency and third party auditors, are now taking a cut of the money, while there is no certainty that it is in every case profitable to the famers. 

One certification that seems to be respected among the coffee farmers in Rachel's book is the "Rainforest Alliance" certification, which requires farmers to preserve indigenous trees and replant new ones, rather than cut them all down in clearing for a new grove of coffee trees, and to diversify their coffee farms with other crops to support the ecology of the land and the health of native animal populations. The more common incentive for famers to obtain this certification is not usually for higher pay, but for a more sustainable operation of their farm. Farmers realize now that if they do not grow coffee in a sustainable way, their won't be a healthy, producing farm left for their children. I believe this is something that coffee consumers like us should intentionally support when we choose where we buy our morning cup of coffee.

The most important message that I'm taking away from When Coffee Speaks is the importance of transparency in the coffee we drink. It's becoming more common in the big cities of the East and the West Coast alike to locate coffee shops who make an effort to sell coffee with identity. Where does our coffee come from? Who are the people that make it? What is their life like? What is the future of their children? These questions should be in the mind of coffeehouses and roasters when buying green coffee, and when we find businesses who work hard to establish these connections, who buy directly from coffee farmers, we should change our coffee habits to support them, to support the people growing our coffee. How do you find places like this? Make a week or month long commitment to discover new coffeehouses in your town/city. At each one, ask the baristas where the coffee they are serving comes from. If it was purchased direct or from roasters who buy direct, believe me, they will know. Coffeehouses who do this kind of thing are proud of it, and are quick to educate their baristas about the proper response (Besides, wouldn't you want your daily baristas to be passionate about where the coffee comes from?). If the response you get is something like, "I think Ethiopia, you know, that one place in Africa," or "Our coffee is the best Italian roast ever," then forget it. Coffee isn't grown in Italy and Ethiopia is too large a coffee producing country to mean anything as a title. The answer you are looking for should make you feel connected to people. What you want is a specific farm or region in a country. What you are looking for are family names, which is usually what a coffee farm is named after. When you find places who know the source of their coffee, pay a little more, drive a little farther, and make the effort to drink sound coffee.

The goal of specialty coffeehouses and roasters should not be solely focuses on better and better coffee every day - the primary goal should be to build relationships with people who grow coffee and to look for opportunities to buy directly from them. Cut out the intermediaries and know where your money is going because it is becoming more and more possibly every day. 

This is what I've seen with amazement while traveling in Costa Rica these last few months. This is what restored my hope in a career in coffee. The insights I have taken from Rachel's book have the benefit of living and traveling in the same coffee growing communities that she did less than two years ago, but I think there is a lot for YOU to learn, whoever you are, inside of this unique book as well. Buy it, read it, share it, and make the daily habit of drinking coffee a more meaningful part of your day.

When Coffee Speaks: Stories From and Of Latin American Coffeepeople by Rachel Northrop

$24 Printed upon order here.

 http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/bookmachine/when-coffee-speaks-northrop

The Montero Coffee Farm

As we say goodbye to the Montero farm it is not because we feel we have had
enough of it. We wish we could stay for months, but will have to return
at another time. Here I have gained a new appreciation for a product used so often
 at home it's value is overlooked. Now that I've been introduced more closely
 to the worlds second largest industry, and formed strong connections
with people in it, I walk away with a vision of coming back andesite a confidence
that a fulfilling career could be made of it. This kind of experience is what
 proves travel to be an important part of our life. With@joymarieallen

In the last few months I have had either too little to talk about or too much to fit in words. And so my blog has been terribly neglected. But now I must share a recent experience I found in Costa Rica that is significant enough to change my life forever.

Before Christmas, while I was still studying Spanish in Dominical, Costa Rica, I became friends with another student from Germany named Max. One weekend, while dealing with the frustrations of the humid climate of the southern coastline, I jumped at an invitation from Max to go up to the mountains and stay a few days with a coffee farmer whom he knew, somehow. In between the small mountain towns of San Marcos and Santamaria, about an hour and a half below the central valley of San Jose, we stayed at the house of Carlos Montero, a coffee farmer in the region of Tarrazu, which I would learn was a reputable coffee growing region known throughout the world. Carlos had built a new house five years earlier and left us to stay in the old house next door along the gently flowing creek, complete with no windows, the remnants of a kitchen that had been ransacked for the new house, and an old rickety balcony that barely supported two people at the same time. This old house, whose only function was to store hundreds of sacks of dried coffee, also became our home, our oasis from the heat of the playas.

Each morning we woke up to breakfast and a fresh cup of coffee which we enjoyed over long conversations about the beverage we held in our hand, the history of Carlos' family, about his adventures traveling the world in his 20s, and about how he came to work in the coffee growing region of Tarrazu. The first day we walked through many mountainous roads which all lead eventually to the Cooperativa de Tarrazu, the second largest coffee producer in all of Costa Rica. Old Toyota trucks, Land Rovers from another time, wound their way through these roads bringing truck loads of dark red coffee berries to the mill. We toured the coffee plant over and saw how coffee is processed on a macro scale. Here 40 million pounds of coffee is processed every four month harvest. We got lucky in the end and cupped coffee with the CEO of the Coop. In San Marcos there is also a church, a central park, and a soccer field - the centerpieces to any Centralamerican town - but here, the center of town and the most frequented is the mill, the securer of livelihood to all coffee farmers and their families in all the land, for the most part.

During these daily talks with Carlos I learned more about coffee than all the five years combined that I had worked as a barista back home. I learned not only what factors on the farm contribute to a good cup of coffee, but also the socio-economic effects of coffee-drinking cultures on those who produce it. I had already known through experience the difficulties sustaining a livelihood based off the income of a coffeehouse alone. Nowadays, the cafe must be linked together with another aspect of coffee culture to be at all successful, be that a music venue, bookstore, or restaurant. Coffee is not enough. But now I see that it isn't enough for the farmers either. The difference is that unlike mo
st coffeehouse owners, coffee is all the farmers have. For this reason coffee famers like Carlos and his brother Manuel, who I would later meet, are forced either to abandon their farms for a different, more secure livelihood altogether or take a huge gamble sticking with them. On their playing cards are written the future of their children.

While the cooperative guarantees a buyer and a price to the farmers and their coffee, it is not a very good one. A big cooperative means big buyers, and big corporate companies like Starbucks and Seattle's Best bargain for their coffee at the cheapest prices possible. One time Manuel told me he was working in New Jersey and saw a pound of "Fair Trade" Tarrazu coffee in Starbucks selling for $14.40. He knew that only the 40 cents on the end is reserved for the farmer.

After leaving the farm that first weekend I knew I had to come back and learn more. While it was a great experience, it hurt to leave with the knowledge of an unfair system and without the prospect of development.

Months went by and I decided to come back to the Montero farm with my sisters and friends who had come to Costa Rica to visit me, and on this second trip we were shown the solution to the problems I had discovered before. This is when we met Manuel, Carlos' brother and business partner. Carlos and Manuel had invested in new land where they were building a micro mill so they could eventually process all of their own coffee and become independent from the cooperativas. They were excited to process their very first truck load of coffee the day after we arrived. Instead of dropping off truck-loads of coffee at the coop and returning to their farms, now the Montero brothers had to multiply their work load by four, and subject themselves to the entire coffee process. Our group was given the opportunity to become apart of this process and ease some of the initial work load.

A day in the life of an indigenous Panamanian coffee picker in Costa Rica. You spend twelve hours traversing steep mountain slopes with an increasingly heavy basket tied at your waist. The only escape from the blistering sun above your head is a meditation whose sole focus is the deep dark red. This color becomes your only purpose, and if your basket contains nothing to contradict it, then you may end up with three dollars when the day is done. You do this seven days a week for the entire four month harvest and then you go home to your family with barely enough to make it through the rest of the year.

Carlos took us on some mountain trails and we hand-picked the coffee berries off some organic trees that had naturally grown wild under the canopy of a small forest. There were six of us total, and after two hours we had picked almost one sack of coffee berries. Next we saw the dark red coffee of our days work thrown into a de-pulping machine and come out only enough to fill half the bag with slimy green beans. Then we returned to the mill to see other loads of coffee laid out on cement platforms and under green house shelves to dry naturally in the sun. Usually, we were told, the process takes about ten days, but it's entirely dependent on the rain and clouds that frequent these mountain valleys. During these ten days, a person must turn the coffee with a rake every 30 minutes in order for it to dry evenly. Also the black peaberries, a coffee bean so small that it avoids the de-pulping process, must be handpicked out of the heaps of drying coffee beans. This work alone occupied three days of our time and it wasn't easy. Hours of tedious work under the stretched-out plastic green house, trapping the heat of the sun around you, is exhausting. Carefully staring down at the little white beans and searching for thousands of smaller black ones is enough to make you go crazy. It took me until the second day to discover that bringing a small stereo and playing some tunes helps with the monotony of this process.

The Montero Coffee Farm

Meanwhile, Carlos and Manuel are de-pulping truck-load after truck-load of coffee berries. There are two indigenous Panamanian workers, one who is shoveling endless heaps of empty coffee berries into the back of the truck and the other who is dumping out baskets of slimy coffee beans out to dry. The heat of the green house dries out your eyes and turns your water warm, depraving it of any refreshing qualities. Pretty soon you feel like your shriveling up to resemble the raisin-like peaberries. Once the coffee is dried the process isn't over. The coffee still retains a light-colored shell over outside that must be removed. Small handfuls are taken from up and down the isles of drying coffee, placed into large hallowed tree stump, and ground using a large sculpted piece of wood. This is an ancient way of doing it, but because the Monteros don't have the money to afford the expensive machinery that would do it for them in minutes, they stick to the way of their father and his father before him. Once the coffee is lightly batted, it is put into a shallow bowl and tossed up and down while blowing on it, until the white shells fly away and only the green coffee beans remain. Its placed into a green coffee humidity tester. If the machine reads somewhere between 8 and 12 percent, the coffee is ready to be bagged.

As a barista one of my favorite coffees was always the Brazilian pea berry. 
Now I hate it with a passion after being given the task of hand picking 
every single pea berry in endless rows of coffee under the canopy of a green house. 
But I guess that don't change the fact that it makes one crazy good cup of coffee!

For me, all of this was gruely hard work, but for coffee farmers this is apart of their everyday life. What challenges they face are not of the hands and back. Once the production is moved from the cooperativas to the micro-mill, the farmers are in charge of finding their own buyers for their coffee. This is the challenge for all micro producers everywhere in the world. Given the scarcity of internet and the lack of education among famers in third world countries, how are they expected to connect with the right people? Also there is the unfortunate reality that they do not set the price of their own crop. That job is reserved for the professional coffee cuppers that spend their lives traveling to the coffee communities of the world, and with the quick taste of the tongue, determine the livelihood of coffee growers everywhere by setting a price based on their coffee. Luckily for Carlos and Manuel, their specialty coffee is much better than can be found at the cooperativas, but it requires so much more time and work. Any buyers who deals with Carlos and Manuel must be willing to pay the fair price that is due to coffees of such fine grade. Businessmen like this are getting harder to find.

Carlos and Manuel feel that three dollars to the pound is a fair price for their coffee, and though this is only a small fraction of what we pay for bulk coffee in the States, this price is practically unheard of in the farmers hands. Bad habits die hard, and the reality is that coffee has always had a dark history of exploitation and unfair prices. The root of this can be found uncomfortably close to the consumer. I think that because our coffee habits take the form of frequents breaks amid our busy days, we reason, it should cost us very little to maintain such a harmless addiction. The Monteros know that if they are to get fair prices for their coffee, they are going to have to sell directly to specialty coffee roasters, bypassing any kind of intermediary who would want a large cut for himself. They believe that the future of specialty coffee is dependent on the spanish phrase transparacion del café. When I asked them the significance of this term they went on for hours explaining some details of their life, and I listened and followed their tangents until it was nothing shorter than a life story. And this is what transparacion del café means. It means for coffee to have a transparency that it has never had before. It means for a relationship to be recognized on both sides of the cup. When this is accomplished our mindless purchases every day which feed our coffee addictions will become something meaningful. How much more satisfying would a cup of coffee be knowing that at the bottom of the cup there is a mutual satisfaction for both ourselves and the farmers.

Four days I've been introduced to the life of coffee farmers like Manuel Montero. And I've been hit hard by the social injustice caused by those who set prices around tables in high rise buildings on Wall Street. It hurts to see the effects of unfair prices in coffee producing communities first hand. Today I sit down with Manuel to learn exactly what I need to do to get into the coffee trading business. I could make a life out of it. And my roots are starting in a deep ethical consciousness for those whose hard work has been terribly exploited. For the first time out of college I feel comfortable with a plan for what's next. Never before has a discovery in travel felt so permanent.

When my best friend Jordan heard that I was staying and working on a coffee farm, he asked"If I send you money, can you buy me coffee?" and then wired $35 over the internet. Why not? I knew Carlos would be stoked. After shipping out the coffee I let him know:

"I ended up only sending you one big bag of the wild organic coffee from Carlos and Manuel's farm. I also had a bag from the cooperative but the shippings so expensive I had to take it out. Shipping was originally 40 bucks with both coffees in there. But what I sent you is the more meaningful coffee for you to have. If you see those photos of us at the farm, you'll know exactly where it came from. The coffee we picked off the tree was this years harvest from the same organic trees that produced your coffee last year. So in a way we worked to replenish his supply of the organic coffee that we all took home. Super awesome. But it's so much work! It was 5 solid work days to produce the same amount of coffee that would last you and I maybe 2 weeks. At the micro mills there is so much more work involved. But I love it. Imagine a machine quickly printing hundreds of copies of some painting that everyone wants in their home, and imagine if you were to ask for one hand painted instead. How much more should you expect to pay for a painting with character, a painting born from the delicate hands of an artist? This is like the specialty coffee trade today except that a "fair trade" label means the farmer might get only three cents more to the lb than normal. It's hard to know the extra work of their hands is worth so little. I gave Carlos 10 bucks from you thinking he would give me a small ziplock bag of it. But he was so happy to sell it and probably had never been given that much money for his coffee. It was probably two lbs that he gave you from his very best prime stock!"

This is an example of transparacion del café. And whether these organic trees make some high quality stuff or only mediocre, I bet it's going to be the best cup of coffee Jordan has every had. Along with the drink comes a smooth satisfaction that your money has gone farther, and your harmless addiction deeper, than your self.