The Coffee Bloomed!

One day a year is all you get.  If you miss that day you will have to wait for the following year.  This year the coffee blossoms lit up the farm on May 9th, just in time for mother’s day.  On this particular day the fields look as though a sprinkling of snow has fallen during the previous night.  When they wake in their splendor, the scent is overpowering.  The coffee blossoms emit a sweet honeysuckle-like fragrance which permeates the air.  By noon all the winged insects in the area have discovered them as well.  Bees and butterflies flicker and alight throughout the plantation pollinating the coffee for next year’s crop.

The Coffee Harvest

This last year was one of the smallest harvests on record at the farm. Unfortunately the combined off-year (coffee is biannual) along with the erratic weather gave us an almost 50% decrease in production. We scrambled to buy coffee from neighboring farms and other organic farms to make up for the loss. What we found was that many people involved in the drug trade laundered money this past harvest buying coffee and selling it to exporters, losing money in the process, messing up the local market, but cleaning their dirty money. The result was that it was  more expense to buy coffee locally than what one would receive by exporting it. Who would think?

News from the Front Line

The coffee harvest started yesterday (Jan. 2) right on schedule and right in the middle of a terrible wind storm.  The electricity in most of the country went off in the afternoon.  In Guatemala City the darkness lasted for three hours and in many areas of the country there still is no light.  The coffee farm is no exception. 

 Coffee must be processed within 24 hours of picking or it begins to ferment.  Since Moyuta is one of the places where the electricity has not been restored, we are watching the clock with bated breath.  We have not been able to start processing and figure that we can only wait until noon today until extreme measures must be taken not to ruin yesterdays picked coffee.  

What can be done?  Our only alternative would be to resack up all the cherries that are now awaiting processing in large vats and haul them by pickup to a processor who either has electricity in another town, or to a processor that has its own generator.  Not good news, but doable.