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.]