The Coffee Producer Toolkit #1: Farming

Welcome to the Toolkit: Understanding Coffee Farm Profitability Welcome to the Coffee Producer Toolkit. Speaker 2 A podcast series built with coffee producers in mind to help you run a more financially sustainable, better managed coffee business. Speaker 1 I'm James Harper. I'm a coffee journalist, creator of Filter Stories, a documentary podcast about the history, science and culture of coffee. Speaker 2 And I'm Lucia Solis, a former winemaker, now coffee fermentation and processing specialist. I live on a coffee farm in Guatemala and I work directly with coffee producers to improve their practices and their livelihoods. My podcast, Making Coffee with Lucia Solis, uses a scientific basis and my 22 years of production experience to share insights into coffee production. Across the series, we're covering the topics that matter most to your bottom line. Agronomy, post harvest, processing, storage, fermentation, my favorite coffee, quality assessment, sales and marketing, and more. Each episode features best practices from leading coffee farmers and experts and presents it in a way that's practical and easy to act on. Speaker 1 And this series is made possible by our partner sponsors, The Coffee Quest, Pinta Lenzi, Deskamex, Grain Pro, Novanesses, BWT and Inter American. We're launching it first in English, a Spanish version is on the way, and then all the episodes will be subtitled on YouTube in Portuguese, Bahasa French and other major languages spoken by coffee producers. Speaker 2 Whether you're a producer, you work with producers, or you're just curious about what it actually takes to make coffee farming a viable business. Speaker 1 We think this is going to be useful and if you're not a farmer, honestly, we think it might just change how you see this industry entirely. Speaker 2 And in this first episode, we're starting with the basics. Coffee Agronomy. Speaker 1 We're first going to cover the importance of measuring your yield and profitability. Then we're getting into the importance of water, followed by plant genetics. We're covering how to manage your replanting plans, then plant nutrition, including how to properly manage your coffee cherry pulp. And finally, we'll be finishing on how to mechanize many tasks on your farm. All these tips and tricks will help you have a more profitable coffee farm. And yes, there are some important things that we will not cover in this episode, for example, pruning, but we've LinkedIn the show notes to great resources where you can dive deeper there. Speaker 2 Right. We can't solve the farm issues in one podcast episode. I love what we try to do. We really do. What we hope to do is to be able to spark, you know, light up some ideas if there are parts of your farm that you have maybe taken for granted, parts of the system that you have maybe not looked at, and to get curious and improve your profitability. Speaker 1 So to start this episode, we want to share a story from a Guatemalan coffee producer we spoke to, whose story reflects the circumstances many coffee producers probably find themselves in today. Speaker 3 Enormous Fernando Castillo so coffee cultor MI familia tenemos una thinka and fajanes in Guatemala. Speaker 1 So Fernando Castillo's family has grown coffee on their 11 hectares in Guatemala since the 1960s, when his grandmother first planted the farm. It's always been close to their hearts, but for Fernando, it was never something he imagined. Speaker 3 Running. Speaker 1 He actually built a career for himself in engineering in the US, and that was his plan until his parents called him back to Guatemala to help manage the family's businesses. And the coffee farm was part of that deal. And so he threw himself into it. But what struck him early on was the logic the coffee farm ran on. As long as it wasn't losing money, that was considered a success. And Fernando pushed back on that. They weren't paying themselves for their time. They weren't accounting for the value of the land. The philosophy was just don't lose too much money because the family had this hope that at some point there would be that one Goodyear somewhere on the horizon, this bumper harvest happening at the same time when the coffee prices were very high. The years kept passing by and that golden event never materialized. But because the losses were never catastrophic on the farm, you know it was easy just to keep waiting for that golden moment. The farm was like this seed sitting in the desert sand, just waiting for the rain to come one day. The farm wasn't dying, but it wasn't really living either. Speaker 2 And this is a super common story for the majority of small and medium sized producers in coffee. And James, Here's the uncomfortable part. Waiting for good years is no longer a strategy because of Brazil. Speaker 3 Mind blown. Del la di Ferencia tan Grande, tan tan Grande guy. Speaker 1 Fernando sees that Guatemala has a massive productivity problem. When you compare what a typical Guatemalan farm produces to what a Brazilian farm is achieving, the gap is staggering. Speaker 3 In. Speaker 1 Guatemala, The average farm sits somewhere around half a tonne of green coffee produced per hectare. But in Brazil, the average is easily four times that, and a good Brazilian producer is hitting 678 times what a Guatemalan farm is yielding. Speaker 3 Brazil and. Speaker 1 That difference is down to agricultural practices, genetics, planting, management, nutrition. That gap in productivity is why it is so difficult to make a coffee farm financially sustainable in the long term in Guatemala. Because Brazil produces so much, it keeps the coffee price lower. Speaker 2 You know, James, throughout this series and interviewing all of these different producers, one of the things that we've realized is that a lot of coffee producers think that their neighbor is their competition. But really most producers are not in competition with their direct neighbor. They're in competition with Brazil with the efficiency of a country like Brazil. Speaker 1 Absolutely. Speaker 2 So to better compete with Brazil, your farm probably needs better agronomic practices. Benchmarking Your Farm's Yield and Financial Profitability And that's why we brought on a couple of economists to give us best practices on boosting your yields and profitability. The first is Lalo Perez. So. Speaker 4 Lalo Perez Bo in Mexico, Timas Estonian folkado and. Speaker 2 Lalo runs a consultancy in Mexico called Biophilia. Lalo helps farms improve their profitability, and when Lala gets called into a farm to help, the first thing he does to begin to improve a farm's profitability before you change anything is you must measure exactly where you are. You have to benchmark your farm. When you benchmark your farm, you know how much room there is for improvement. One of the first important benchmarks is figuring out your yield per hectare. Speaker 1 For a non mechanized producer, as in a producer not using mechanized harvesting like they do in Brazil, As Lalo explains, the benchmark he sets is one ton of green coffee per hectare. One ton of green coffee per hectare is the minimum viable yield, roughly 17 sacks of parchment coffee. Below that, he says. You're going to struggle to make the economics work. Speaker 2 I want us to sit with that number for a second. One ton per hectare. Most farms are nowhere near that. And Lalo is saying that that's your floor, not your ceiling. If you're below it, the question isn't how do I improve. It might be whether coffee is even the right crop for your land. Speaker 1 And Lalo finds himself asking that question about coffee farms where he lives in Mexico. The average in Mexico is 3 kilograms per hectare. That's less than 1/3 of that minimum. But of course it goes beyond Mexico. We heard from Fernando in Guatemala earlier and he suggests the average there is half a ton. That's half the minimum. And just to be clear, Lalo's one ton per hectare, that goes for organic cultivation too. Organic farms tend to have a lower yield compared to conventional farms that use agrochemicals. But nevertheless, Lalo says he has seen organic certified farms in Brazil that produce 2 1/2 tons per hectare. Speaker 4 Certificatos organicos in Brazil que la procilas tados Punto cinco Torre la de cafe re port Italia, OK. Speaker 2 So that's your first benchmark yield one ton of green coffee per hectare. But there is a second benchmark that's equally, if not more important, and that is profitability. To explore that more, we spoke with a second agronomist, my friend Sam Knowlton. Speaker 5 My name is Sam Knowlton and I'm with Soil Symbiotics, so I'm an agronomy consultant and regenerative agriculture specialist. I've been doing this about going on 17 years and I've had the chance to work all over the world and with over 300 farms. Speaker 2 And Sam's argument was that focusing on yield is important, but profitability is even more important. Speaker 5 Yield, I think is a bit of a false metric sometimes. And I think what's a better way to look at things is like profitability, because you could have a very high yield with tremendous labor costs and not be profitable. And you know what's better, to have high yields of very poor quality coffee or lower yields of very high quality coffee that that's going to be compensated much higher? Speaker 2 Yeah, and Lalo also agrees with this and he says that you absolutely need to measure your profitability. So before you change anything on your farm, you need to know how you're performing against these two benchmarks. What is your yield per hectare and what is your profitability? You know, James, this series is meant for people that want a fundamental understanding of how to run a profitable business and saying that we should, you know, know whether we are profitable. It sounds maybe even too obvious for us. That sounds so simple. Of course you should know if you're profitable. You know, it almost feels like it shouldn't be worth saying. But I can tell you from my experience with a lot of coffee producers and coffee farmers, even ones that have been farming for decades, for generations, a lot of this information tends to be, you know, kept in your head. It's, it's just passed down orally. There's very few things that are written down and calculated because of the nature of the inheritance or thinking of this farm as your duty and not necessarily making that connection for it to be a business. Like it's more like vibes. A lot of them know roughly what they spent, they know what they got paid. There's a general feeling of like, oh, we had a good year or we had a bad year, but that's not the same thing as having a spreadsheet and knowing your profitability per hectare. I think another issue with being able to know your profitability is that a lot of producers don't take into account their time because a lot of the labor is family labor and it's hard to know how to quantify that. So you know, you're not actually paying yourself a wage. As we heard from Fernando Castillo, that was a line item that they were really not taking into account into their overall profitability. Speaker 1 And that's precisely why, when Lalo starts working with a new farm, the first thing he does before recommending any economic changes is to look at the books. And what he sometimes finds is that the bookkeeping isn't good enough to even answer the most basic questions. What is the farms yield per hectare isn't making money, and that's why Lalo says the best investment you can make on your farm is getting your bookkeeping in order. OK. So let's just take as a given that you as a coffee producer, you have great records, you know your profitability in your yield per hectare and you see that there is a gap. Maybe you're not profitable every year, maybe your yields are well below that one ton per hectare benchmark. If that's the case, now let's get into the agronomics to see what you can change on your farm to become more profitable. Optimizing Water Use for Coffee Farm Success And according to Lalo, the first thing you have to fix is water. That's coming up next. Speaker 2 So let's start with the one that surprised most people. It actually surprised us when we were having the conversation with Lalo, and that was water. Speaker 1 So as Lalo mentioned, water is the number one driver of a farm's profitability. Speaker 4 The annuals Massacos. Speaker 1 Lalo sees that years with insufficient rainfall are becoming more and more common and this has a direct knock on effect on the harvest. Coffee plants need water to arrive at the right moment to trigger flowering. When the rains don't come on queue, the flowers don't come either. And without the flowers, there's no harvest. And without a good harvest, there is no path to profitability. Now the trees themselves, when there's little water, yes, they survive, but they're not thriving. They're not what is technically called turgid. There's a lack of water in the plant system. And he mentions how many producers who work in full sun systems, you know, with no irrigation, they can see that their plants are looking dehydrated and they feel like there's nothing they can do about it. All they feel they can do is. Speaker 4 Pray for rain now. Speaker 1 Let's hear a producer listening to this might think to themselves. Well, I guess the solution is irrigation, right? Let's add water to the plants. Speaker 2 And James, in many other industries, this is the way that it goes. Everybody irrigates. From my background in winemaking, almost every farm was irrigated. In fact, working in the Napa Valley, a lot of marketing was done around farms that weren't. You had to signal we are dry farmed, we don't have irrigation. And that was something that a lot of people valued. So the standard was irrigation and the standouts were vineyards that are dry farmed. Whereas in coffee we have the opposite, where the standard is that they are not irrigated and it's a very few exceptional coffee farms that are. Speaker 1 Very few indeed. Speaker 2 So we spoke to one of the few farms that has invested in an irrigation system just to get a feel for like, what does it actually look like if you're trying to irrigate your farm when very few people are actually doing it around you? We spoke to 1 producer in Mexico who made this work. Speaker 6 So Julio Ortega men cuentro in Puebla, Mexico, and la Sierra Norte de de Puebla, and finca Los pinoses una finca organica Y carbono notra. Speaker 2 Julio Ortega's farm is in Sierra Norte de Puebla. Her farm is called Finca Los Pinos, and what makes her really unique is that not only is she organic, but she's actually a certified carbon neutral farm. It's a smallish farm, it's 7 hectares and she produces about 50 bags of green coffee, more or less in a given year. Speaker 6 Julia. Speaker 1 'S farm, like almost every coffee farm in Mexico, runs entirely on rainfall. But three years ago, a severe cold snap hit, followed by a brutal drought. Now her husband happens to be an irrigation specialist, and he came to her with a proposal. Let's put in irrigation. She thought he was out of his mind, The cost of a proper irrigation system on a coffee farm? Unthinkable, But he pushed back. He could do it economically, he said. She kept resisting until he landed an argument she couldn't counter. Speaker 6 Do you want? Speaker 1 To lose the entire harvest and all your clients. And so they installed an emergency irrigation system. And that year the farm not only survived, it thrived. The coffee went on to win a competition and the prize money covered the cost of the investment entirely. Speaker 2 So Julio's husband Ruin gave us a technical breakdown. The drip irrigation system they installed ran to about $1700 per hectare. Once the design is done, a couple of people can put it up within a few short days. Speaker 3 But. Speaker 2 The design work is a critical part. The hydraulic calculations, pump sizing, pipe diameter, water source capacity, these things really do require an expert. If you get it wrong, the system simply won't perform. Speaker 3 This is important. Speaker 2 To be clear, what they built at Finca Los Pinos, it wasn't full irrigation. Ruben calls it Riego de Oxilio emergency support irrigation. So the goal isn't to water the plants constantly, which isn't necessarily what you want when a coffee farm anyway. It's specifically to protect the flowering and fruit formation during these critical dry weeks when the rain simply doesn't come. Exactly what Lalo was saying. Speaker 3 And. Speaker 1 Now just to round this out, let's look at what it takes to irrigate a Brazilian farm. I reconnected with Medina from Fasena Palizo. They are a Brazilian farm that I made a Filter Stories episode about last year where I followed their journey trying to get into the specialty coffee world. Speaker 2 We can see the environmental change. Speaker 1 And just as Lilo described, they've been hard hit by shifting rainfall patterns. Five years ago they're producing 44 bags per hectare. Last year that number halved. Speaker 2 So our productivity in 2020 was around 4460 kilo bags per acre and last year what we had is 20 bags. Speaker 1 Flowers not forming because water was not arriving at the right time, and so they then focused on trying to irrigate parts of the farm, hoping to claw back roughly half of the harvest they'd lost. So this is not a full recovery, but just enough to soften the blow. And look, even for them. It really wasn't easy. Speaker 2 The irrigation system is very expensive. Very expensive. Speaker 1 For them, irrigation is $10,000 a hectare. That's over five times more expensive than Julia over in Mexico. And what was also really complicated is the bureaucracy. They needed permits from 2 separate government bodies and actually in the end they were only able to irrigate 6 of their 25 hectares. Speaker 2 Which is around $60,000. Speaker 1 So Long story short, irrigation can be a very significant investment. Speaker 2 And it's deeply technical. But there is good news. When speaking with Lalo, he explained that there's actually a great deal you can do to help your plants get water at the right time to trigger those all important flowerings without ever needing to irrigate at all. So Lalo's answer to the water problem isn't only to add more water to your farm. There's actually a lot you can do if you stop losing the water that you already have. Speaker 4 And. Speaker 2 His preferred method for this is a shade system. The first thing that shade allows you to do is to reduce transpiration. A coffee plant growing in full sun is losing water through its tissue all day long, and that's an unnecessary loss that shade can simply eliminate. The second is about protecting the soil itself. At night, moisture accumulates near the surface, but the moment the morning sun hits an unshaded farm, that humidity vanishes. With shade cover, you trap it. Speaker 4 And. Speaker 2 The third is fixing the mineral composition of the soil, because that affects how deep down the roots are able to go where there is more water. Tropical coffee soils are often acidic with excess aluminum and sometimes sodium, both of which stunt root development. By applying lime and agricultural gypsum, you can correct the acidity of the soil and that encourages roots to push deeper into the soil where the water is sitting deeper down out of reach of the sun. Speaker 4 And. Speaker 2 So when you put it all together, the logic is simple. In many cases you don't need to add more water, just stop wasting the water your farm already has. Speaker 1 Your plants getting water at the right time ensures that the flowering takes place as it should and that your harvests are strong. Get the water wrong, your profitability falls apart. Selecting Coffee Varieties for Yield and Resilience Coming up next. Speaker 4 La genetica. Speaker 1 Choosing the right genetics OK, so now let's explore genetics. When it comes to having a profitable coffee farm, choosing the right variety of tree is extremely important. And Lucia, I know you have some very strong opinions on this. Speaker 2 I do have very strong feelings about this because I hear this conversation a lot in the regions that I work with, especially in Latin America and in Colombia. I, I lived in a region in Santuario where some of the producers started planting exotic varieties. They started planting geishas and whoosh, whoosh and you can noides and, you know, kind of looking on Instagram to see what was the latest cool variety and trying to get some seeds, smuggle some seeds in a suitcase and plant those in their farm. But it's one of the biggest traps that I see in specialty coffee right now for farmers. Speaker 1 Right. And now here is the story of a farmer who fell into exactly that trap. When I was down in Huila, in the South of Columbia, I was visiting producers who work with our partner sponsor for this series, The Coffee Quest, and one of the farmers I met was Palino Quintero. Speaker 7 When I mean ambres paulino Quintero buella finca la brizas Santa Maria willa Vera San Miguel. Speaker 1 Now, Palino had been farming the conventional Colombia and Castillo coffee varieties, but at some point his Cartura trees were struggling with leaf rust and he wanted to shake things up. He'd seen his neighboring producer selling an exotic variety to the Coffee Quest. It had worked really well for them and he wanted it. So he got hold of some seeds, planted a small lot and the trees looked beautiful. Fantastic foliage, strong, healthy. Speaker 7 Muy bonito larbal for yahen ojato. Speaker 1 But when the harvest came, there were very few cherries the trees gave him. Speaker 7 Almost nothing. Speaker 1 He was lucky that the lot had been small. In fact, the Coffee Quest team would never have advised him to replant his entire farm with an exotic variety. Their guidance was always to try, you know, a small lot first, see if it works, and then scale up. And in this case it didn't work. Speaker 2 So that caution saved him, but had he gone all in, the consequences would have been really severe. Speaker 1 And This is why Lalo refers to exotic varieties as dangerous. Chasing exotic varieties, he says, is dangerous because you're putting the financial health of your farm at risk based on a promise, a hope. Exotic varieties can be demanding, unforgiving to grow. And even if you manage to replicate the quality of your neighbor, you know the one who gets the higher price, that doesn't mean that you'll get their price too, because there are many things that stand in between you producing a high quality coffee and getting a high price for that coffee. Speaker 4 I'm. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I want to make sure that this land, because it's kind of counterintuitive given the direction that specialty coffee marketing has gone. They see there's a demand for these varieties, and so farmers think, well, I should plant those varieties. But I think the part that's missing is that an exotic variety alone does not guarantee a premium price. You need to have, you know, market access. You need to make sure that you can sell that to the right buyer, have that relationship. A lot of these varieties might need different processing. So the same thing that you did for your Cathura may not be the same thing that you need to do for your geisha. And also, you know, timing in the market from the moment that you see a trend to the time when you can harvest that fruit could be years. And a lot of these trends are kind of over in months. The agronomic cycle is much slower than the Instagram trends. And so betting your farming's replanting on some of these exotic varieties is really a high risk strategy. Speaker 1 And that's why, when it comes to genetics, Lalo's advice is clear. Speaker 4 And CIO selectionas porzu robustesa agronomica. Speaker 1 Choose varieties for their robustness and their yield, and not for their promise of an exotic cut profile. Varieties like Sachimor and Katimor. They are workhorses, resistant to disease, deep rooted, high yielding, not glamorous but grown well and processed well. Lalo says he's seen them score. Speaker 4 878889 points. The genetics don't have to be exciting. Speaker 1 They have to be reliable. Speaker 2 There's two issues. Like 1 issue is I think a lot of farmers have been told that certain varieties have like a ceiling of quality. And if you wanted to get that higher ceiling and reach that new market for specialty, you had to plant a different exotic variety. You had to plant a eunoides or a woosh woosh or a laudina. And I have personally seen that that's not true. I think that, you know, a well grown, maybe quote UN quote boring or traditional variety will outperform a new exotic, trendy variety that someone doesn't know how to manage yet. But another thing that Lalo shares with us is that we may even be wrong about that choice because there's another category of hybrids. Speaker 1 Yes, Ladder mentions that we're living through a remarkable moment in coffee. Speaker 4 Momento. Speaker 1 Because hybrid varieties are beginning to emerge that offer the best of both worlds, the agronomic robustness you need, but also the quality the market's asking for. And he's really enthusiastic about the new hybrids like H1 Centro Americano and H16 Mundo Maya. Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm a big fan of hybrids. That's the coffee that I produce in the farm where I live and work in Guatemala. We do Centro Americano and H1 as the core of our offering. And so I have seen first hand that you don't have to sacrifice yield for disease resistance and you don't have to sacrifice cup quality for yield. So I think that there's a lot of promise in these varieties, especially with processing, as we'll get into in future episodes. Speaker 1 Yes. But many of our listeners, you know, they will have farms in many different parts of the world and they may not have easy access to those specific hybrid varieties. Speaker 2 So World Coffee Research has a fantastic web page where you can examine different varieties for your farm and see what hybrids are available for where you are. Speaker 1 So to close out this section on genetics, don't chase exotic varieties. They're risky, as Paulino Quintero found out first hand. Focus instead on tried and tested conventional varieties or this new generation of hybrids that are beginning to emerge. Choose yield and resilience as your primary criteria, and if you grow them carefully and process them well, quality and profitability will follow. And just to finish on Paulino's story, after his Pakamata experiment didn't pan out, he chose instead a tried and tested variety. Speaker 7 And hello, they will be assembled on Katura Chiroso. Speaker 1 A Katura chiroso, which despite the name, isn't actually a Katura. It's another exotic variety, but unlike the PAC Camara, it has a better track record because it's been proven in another Colombian coffee region, Antiochia, for over 30 years. And Danin Wheeler, he's relieved to see the trees are now producing a good harvest. Incremental Renovation: A Safer Replanting Strategy James in this series we've spoken to a lot of producers and there's a trap we keep coming across, one that catches out a lot of farmers and it has to do with how you go about replanting your farm. We've heard stories of producers getting the timing and the approach badly wrong in ways that seriously cripple their businesses. So we want to share a simple rule of thumb. When you're thinking about renovating your farm, ask yourself whether you can do it without taking on debt, without reaching for external capital. Because debt is expensive and it's dangerous. If the harvest doesn't come in the way you hoped, you are financially exposed. If there is a way to renovate your farm without taking on external capital, without taking on debt, we suggest that you strongly consider that path. Speaker 1 100% and we want to share a story here that kind of hammers his point home. So going back to Fernando at the top of the episode, the Guatemalan producer, he recognized that, you know, his farm had to compete with Brazil. The farm was under managed, underperforming. Speaker 3 And he has an. Speaker 1 Engineering background and his instinct is to do things properly, just RIP out all the old trees, replant the entire farm, start from scratch with everything in the right place. But his approach required serious capitals around $2.00 per plant, and that's across 10s of thousands of plants, plus the cost of labour, which is becoming increasingly hard to find across Central America now. Fernando didn't have to take on debt. He was lucky that the wider family business could fund the replanting, but looking back, he still regrets this approach. Speaker 3 John entendi lo beneficios economicos quezopoiatra airque mucho menos inversion. Speaker 1 Because so much of his farm, even in his undermanaged state, was still producing cherries, still generating cash. Looking back, Fernando thinks he should have followed the advice of Guatemala's National Coffee Association and a cafe. Instead of replanting everything, they advocate for boosting the yield of existing trees through structured pruning, what's known as tissue management, paired with better nutrition, preventive pest management, and weed and shade management. Those are relatively cheap fixes that lift yields and generate even more cash, which would then have funded the gradual renovation of his farm. And so actually, paradoxically, he could have reached profitability faster by renovating his farm incrementally and. Speaker 3 Not all at once. Speaker 1 Go slow. Use the trees you already have for cash. Change your farm incrementally. That will get you to profitability with less risk and maybe even faster than bringing in external money. Speaker 2 You know, maybe, James, this seems again like too basic information to go slow and to not take big risks. And it's a very logical approach and it makes sense. But I think what we have to remember is that a lot of these farms and a lot of coffee is not logical. It's emotional. And you can see how people can either get really excited about a new project and just have all of that energy and go forward and want to make a big change. And so I think that it's important to remember like that how really smart people can really easily fall into these common traps, these common mistakes. So growers don't feel the need to rush. Take your time. Eventually you'll produce the farm of your dreams. But for it to survive financially, you need to minimize the amount of risk you're taking. So just go slow. You'll get there eventually. Customizing Nutrition for Your Coffee Trees OK, let's talk nutrition. Fertilizing your coffee trees, which to me as a non economist sounds pretty simple, right? You just put the nutrients in the ground, trees take them up and they grow better, right? Speaker 2 Exactly. End of section, James. When it comes to nutrition, most farmers would do what Paulino used to do. They follow the advice of local government economist who tell them which fertilizer to apply, how much and how often. Speaker 7 And. Speaker 2 This kind of guidance has been handed out for years by coffee organizations all around the world, but there is a very big problem with it. The advice they're offering is average advice. It's A1 size fits all recommendation, but in practice that means it doesn't fit anyone's farm particularly well. Speaker 1 Lalo goes so far to say that this advice can even be fatal. Speaker 2 What both Lalo and Sam strongly believe is that there is enormous value in understanding your own soil and running your own analysis and figuring out what your specific trees actually need. Speaker 1 And when you get that right, the improvements can be enormous to your plants health and yields. Speaker 2 Sam shared with us a story that shows exactly why getting your nutrition right for your specific farm can make a huge difference to your profitability. Speaker 1 Yes, and in the story Sam mentions NPKNPK stands for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. They are the three core nutrients that plants need to grow, and they are the building blocks of most fertilizers. Speaker 5 There's one farm I can think of where they were. They were basically for decades applying these rates of NPK and essentially saw like huge drop off in production, huge increase in disease and pest incidents. And you know, we're basically at a point where they weren't sure if they could continue to farm economically. So we, we took a soil analysis and did a, a whole kind of farm diagnostic and assessment and saw that really the bottlenecks in the system were not due to a lack of nitrogen, for example. So what we did is we, we did a more holistic integrated amending approach where we balanced out all of the minerals in the soil that we were able to test for. So calcium, magnesium, we're looking at all the trace minerals as well and got them more balanced out in, in the right ratios to each other. So we're not creating antagonisms where an excess of one blocks the uptake of another. And we did this over time and we, we pulled back eventually 100% on the nitrogen applications. So we, we stopped applying the synthetic nitrogen that had been recommended for decades. And we did another type of analysis where we're looking at the nutrients in the plant SAP and the tissue. And every year for the past seven years, the ranges of nitrogen have been in the ideal range without the application of synthetic nitrogen. So that just goes to show that they were over applying for years and years and years without knowing. Speaker 2 So the farm and Sam's story was in decline. Yields were falling, profitability was sliding, and the root cause was simple. By following only the generic advice handed down from national coffee organizations, the farm had been failing to meet its plant specific nutritional needs for years and the result was a financially unprofitable farm. It was kind of ironic that adding the nitrogen was causing the trees to be sick and when they stopped over applying nitrogen, the trees were actually able to better resist the pessa diseases that were plaguing them. Speaker 1 OK, so now we're going to cover practically what you can do to get a better handle on your plant specific nutritional needs. Speaker 2 Lalo starting point is 2 tests. Speaker 4 Con analysis A Swello Lauta Cosa Cases and CLS Tamara Analysis Foliar Estanian. Speaker 2 A soil test and a foliar test, if you're unfamiliar, a soil test is literally just taking a sample of the soil at the base of the coffee tree and then you send that to a lab and they will tell you what nutrients you have in your soil. Versus a foliar test is when you take a leaf from one of the coffee trees and then you send that to the lab and they'll break it up, break it down for you, and then they'll tell you what specific nutrients your plant might be deficient in now. Speaker 1 In Latin America, a soil and foliar analysis might cost you somewhere between 150 and $400.00. We also want to be clear that this is actually a different test from another test. You might be familiar with the circular chromatography test, where you know you put an extract of soil in the middle of some treated paper and it slowly migrates outwards, creating these feathery ring patterns. That test reveals the soil's vitality, how biologically alive it is, but it doesn't give you mineral numbers. And that's what you need. And that's what soil and foliar analysis give you, those precise numbers. Speaker 2 Now when you do these tests and you get back the results, you might see that your soil is actually not deficient in any minerals, that it has plenty of them. But don't be fooled, because just because a mineral exists in the soil, it doesn't mean that the mineral is actually making its way up into the plant. Speaker 1 Lalo explains that there are many situations where the plant itself is lacking a specific nutrient, and yet, paradoxically, the soil has plenty of it. So the problem isn't a shortage of a nutrient, it's an imbalance of nutrients. He gave us the example of potassium. Speaker 4 CN 2 Analysis Foliarte falta potasio. Non necessary amente significa canelsuelo falta potasio. Speaker 1 If your foliar analysis shows that your plants are deficient in potassium, your instinct might be to apply more potassium. But by also doing a soil analysis, that would reveal that there's already enough potassium in the soil, and the real issue is that that potassium is being blocked by an imbalance. Of calcium or magnesium? Without these tests, you would never know. Speaker 4 So it's. Speaker 2 Kind of like, you know, sending a package and the UPS man keeps sending the package and sending the package, but it's just left at the door and no one is receiving the package. So just because something is being delivered doesn't mean it's actually being accepted. And the balance of minerals is what matters because it tells us what a plant can digest. Speaker 1 Now, from Lalo's experience, he also sees that the pH of the soil could be the thing that's stopping the plant from absorbing the nutrients from the soil. Speaker 2 PH is really important because it affects what the plant can absorb. So the pH is maybe the lock that lets you open the door and actually receive the packages that the mailman is delivering. Speaker 4 The case importante saberque estabuscando. Speaker 1 So this now brings us to what kind of soil analysis you should actually be looking for. Many coffee institutes and agencies offer free soil analysis, but Ladder warns that these tend to be limited. They cover the obvious nutrients like nitrogen. Speaker 4 And potassium. Speaker 1 But there are other measurements he considers even more important. The soils pH, it's cation exchange capacity, and it's base saturation. These factors determine whether the plant can actually absorb the nutrients that are already there in the soil. So when you're looking for a lab to do a soil analysis, make sure it covers those other nutrients too, not just the major nutrients. Speaker 4 Port a temple la parte El piace la parte del intercamio cationico la partes aturacion de vases yolin cuentro mass importante. Speaker 1 Now, Lucia, I can imagine that many listeners, when they hear terms such as base saturation, cation, exchange capacity, not to mention the names and functions of the maybe 70 nutrients that Sam Nolton estimates plants actually need to thrive. This is extremely complex information. How can a producer wrap their heads around this very complex information they're going to get back from these testing labs? A listener may be thinking to themselves, is there maybe like one thing I should pay attention to more than any other thing? Speaker 2 Well listeners, Lalo has advice for us on this front as well. He has a very sobering saying. Speaker 4 SBN CEO no Lois. Speaker 2 SBN CEO no Lois. Speaker 1 Yes, actually, Lalo said that exact same phrase to me the first time I met him, quite a few years ago in Honduras. Speaker 4 Understanding soil biology is really simple. It's not, it's just not simple. It's, it's, it's extremely complex and dynamic. And we have this tendency for linear thinking. We're a culture to linear thinking, not only as humans, but also with our scientific culture. And so we always want to mean like, what is the one thing? And and it just doesn't work that way in nature. Speaker 2 And I think what we want to emphasize here is that yes, it is a complex biological system, you know, soil and plant nutrition. And Lalo is making it clear that there are no easy shortcuts. So, you know, the bad news is, James, there's not one thing that you can do to improve all of your farm. But with resources, Lalo and I think we believe that there are a lot of things that you can learn yourself and, and educate yourself on some of these topics. And hopefully, you know, get resources to contact other people that can help you. Speaker 1 And Lalo has a wider philosophical point. Speaker 4 Estamos obligados are responsibilities. Speaker 1 He says look, if your profession is coffee farming, you need to be an expert agriculturalist. But there is good news. Speaker 2 We're in a unique era where a lot of coffee producers can self educate in a way that hasn't been accessible before. Speaker 1 Ask around. Go to the fertilizer companies. They will have trained agronomists on hand. Find people in your network, do these tests and become an expert in your coffee trees. Figuring out your plants specific nutritional needs will boost your plants productivity, it'll increase their disease resistance, it'll lower the amount of money you're spending on fertilizer inputs, and your farm will be more profitable. Turning Cherry Pulp into Valuable Farm Fertilizer Coming up next, making your own cherry pulp fertilizer, but done well. At harvest time, your farm will generate an enormous amount of cherry pulp and you have to do something with it. You can't do what was done 50 years ago and just dump it into the surrounding waterways. We all know that is catastrophic for the environment. Speaker 2 This cherry pulp is an incredibly valuable resource if you know how to use it. When we can break it down and get all of that rich organic matter, it can be really beneficial to your soil. But for most of my visits to coffee farms, I see that this is a very neglected part of the process. Most of the cherry pulp is not handled at all. Not handling it at all means having the cherry pulp just sit in a pile and rot on its own. When it's properly treated and decomposed well, it adds to the nutrition in the soil, which we know directly adds to the health of our coffee plants. Speaker 1 So what we want to do here is quickly cover best practice when it comes to making your own fertilizer. And for this, we spoke to another economist, Manuel Mata from Colombia, Minombre Manuel Mata. Manuel has spent much of his career offering agronomic advice to coffee producers across his region near Santa Mata in northern Colombia. Speaker 2 You know, one thing that I've seen a lot is that a lot of coffee growers or coffee farmers will take the pulp of the coffee cherry and you take that coffee pulp and you just put it on the ground at the base of the coffee tree. And maybe you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I do that. What's what's wrong with that? Because the logic makes sense. That's what would happen in nature. If there's a tree and you have fruit that isn't picked, it would just fall to the ground and it would be decomposed and recycled back into the tree. Speaker 1 Manuel explains that the problem with this approach is that coffee cherry pulp is highly acidic, and so if you simply pile it up and leave it under the coffee tree, it's going to change the pH of the surrounding soil. And as we've heard from Lalo, getting your soil's pH right is critical. If your soil is too acidic, your plants are going to struggle to get certain nutrients. The solution, of course, is composting, breaking down the pulp properly before applying it, and almost all producers who produce specialty coffee do this. But Manuel is clear that how you do it matters enormously. And actually here, there is one simple indicator that you're getting it wrong. The smell. If your compost pile has a foul, rotten odor, Manuel says the decomposition process is happening incorrectly. A healthy compost shouldn't smell bad. In fact, it shouldn't smell at all. Speaker 2 Yeah, In my experience, that rotten smell is incredibly common. And it's been really funny when I've been on some farm visits with clients. And there's also buyers who happen to, you know, coincide with my visits. And I just hear about how much they love that smell because they were associating this decomposed cherry with the harvest and with their trip and, you know, all of these, you know, romantic elements. But really it's it's wrought. So it's kind of one of the stranger things about origin tourism and specialty coffee. That sign that people find romantic for me is actually a sign of mismanagement. Speaker 1 So what's going wrong in the compost? Speaker 2 Manuel explains that the foul smell is actually coming from the center of the pile, the part that isn't getting enough air. The decomposition happening there is anaerobic and that's what causes the rot. And so the solution is simple, turn the pile every couple of days, just physically rotating it. It ensures that the center gets aerated regularly and that the whole pile breaks down correctly. And also remember to keep it somewhere sheltered out of direct sun and away from rain. Speaker 1 And a little bit of engineering can also go a long way. Paulino, who we heard from earlier. The Coffee Quest team worked with him to design this simple but effective composting. Speaker 7 System like La Pulpa cafe say deposit. Speaker 1 So today what Paulino does is he deposits his coffee pulp into a covered pit with a slatted floor. That way, the liquid, what he calls honey water, drains away rather than sitting trapped inside the pulp itself. He then collects that liquid and he reapplies it back into the pile. He also turns the pile regularly and also adds liquid microorganisms to accelerate the decomposition. And he knows the process is working because there is no foul smell. In his case, it takes around six months and then the compost is ready, fully broken down, rich with nutrients that his plants can actually absorb. Speaker 2 James, I want to be clear that decomposing the cherry pulp can help subsidized the cost of fertilizer. But if you are really trying to move away from synthetic fertilizers and only use the compost that's produced in your farm, that process is not cheap because it takes a lot more inputs. And a lot of the times producers have to bring in external organic matters potentially from other farms or other resources. So it can get really expensive to completely replace your fertilizer inputs using only your cherry pulp as a starting material. But what we're trying to say is that it's a really great supplement that can help cut down that bill. And when cherry pulp is untreated, it actually creates a problem. So if we can turn this problem into subsidizing your fertilizer inputs, then that is a cost savings. Speaker 1 And so get your composting right, you'll stop polluting your water and damaging your trees, which is bad for the long term health of your farm. And instead, you can improve the microbiology of your soil. This will build your trees natural defences against pests and diseases. And that will protect your yield. And higher and more consistent yields help you become more profitable. Low-Cost Tools to Reduce Farm Labor Costs Coming up next, we explore some ways to reduce your labor costs so your farm can be more profitable. Speaker 2 OK, so now let's talk about labor, because labor and the people involved in making coffee, that's getting increasingly scarce. Speaker 1 And we really got to hear how big an issue this is when we spoke with Sergio de la Vecchia, a coffee producer in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Minombre. Sergio de la Vecchia de la Finca Finca de la Vecchia, a guy in Guatusco, Veracruz, Mexico. His family runs one of the largest coffee farms in the region, and at his scale during harvest, he employs basically an entire village of people. But because he employs so many people, he feels today's labour scarcity very strongly. Many workers, he says, migrate N to the US and Canada, and those who stay are increasingly being enticed away to work on other crops. Avocado, chayote, lemon. The pressure has got so severe that Sergio had to scale back his expansion plans entirely, reducing his growth rate by 60% because he simply couldn't find the labor. Speaker 2 And, and there it is. There is your lack of profitability as a farm when you cannot even grow as a farm because even if you wanted to grow, you can't find the labor. But we don't even have to talk about growth. We can also think about if you just want to operate at your baseline and you don't have the people to do that. I've definitely seen some farms just selling their cherry and not being able to do the next step. Speaker 1 Now in Brazil, almost every coffee farmer is using tools where they can. Lucio, what's the context here for why this is a novel idea outside of Brazil? Speaker 2 Because labour has been available historically, there have been a lot of people to work. Efficiencies didn't need to exist. You could just hire somebody or have them work extra time. A lot of farmers aren't used to thinking about how to make the process more efficient because they haven't had to. But now we're in a world where you have to find efficiencies using tools. Speaker 1 And that is exactly what Sergio has done. Soto Semos Stratado. He has tried to mechanize as many aspects of the farm as possible. The harvesting still remains manual that he can't change because his land is too mountainous. But all the day-to-day non harvest work, clearing weeds, applying fertilizer, fumigation, pruning, he has mechanized a lot of these tasks and he's been able to reduce his labour needs by around 15%. Speaker 2 But James, you know, a producer might think that 15%, that's not a very big difference. Speaker 1 Yes, 15% might sound modest, but let's think about what that actually means in practice on your farm. If you're working a typical six day week, a 15% efficiency gain means roughly a full day saved every week. That's 52 days a year. That's getting close to two months saved every year. As a producer, ask yourself what could you do with an extra 2 months of time on your farm? Speaker 2 Right. So let's specifically look at the tools you could invest in for a large producer like Sergio, he's going to want tools that can do very serious volumes, but they can cost a pretty penny. We're talking a battery powered pruning saw, a motorized sprayer, a mechanized fertilizer spreader, maybe $1000 all in for these tools per worker. You know, for a farm at Sedjoscale in such a tight labor market, that investment absolutely makes sense because these tools are designed to get through 10s of thousands of coffee trees efficiently. But what if you're a smaller producer? Well, I think in that case they're definitely overkill. But that doesn't mean smaller producers should ignore the opportunity to find efficiency gains on their farm. If anything, it matters even more when you're small without the luxury of hired help. Of course, you're doing more of the work yourself, or your family's doing the work. Your farm might be so small that you're holding down a second job. So any tool that saves you time and reduces your input costs while delivering the same results is essential. And the good news is that cheap, effective tools do exist for smaller producers. Speaker 1 So what we're going to do now is walk through three areas where tools exist for smaller producers that can dramatically speed up the work of running a coffee farm. The 1st is applying fertilizer, the second is wedding, and the third is spraying. So let's talk about fertilizing. Speaker 2 So when it comes to applying fertilizer, it may not sound like the most complicated job on the farm. The traditional approach is very simple. You strap a sack of fertilizer pellets to your body, you walk the rows and you bend down at each tree and you scatter the pellets at the base of the tree, one tree at a time. Pretty simple. Speaker 1 But this could be done a lot faster and with a lot less effort. There is a tool developed by a company in Columbia called Innovicit, where instead of having to bend down every single time to spread pellets at the base of the tree, this Innovicit tool speeds it up. Only $30. It's a simple plastic tube, and there's a flap at the bottom of the tube that disperses the pellets as they fall, spreading them evenly around the base of the tree rather than landing in a single pile. And I reached out to a producer who actually uses it, Astrid. Speaker 6 Medina. Speaker 1 Astrid has about 14 hectares of coffee and she told me the tool made a real difference because instead of having to bend down every single time at every single tree, now she just walks upright along the roads of coffee trees. It's faster, easier and doesn't wear her body out. The founder of Innova Kit Hugo Lopez, he claims using this tool is 4 times faster and so a job that might have taken 12 days now takes just three and we need 12 times and when farmer use this one reduced to three. Speaker 2 About 12 to 3 is a massive reduction. That's the fantastic improvement for 30 bucks. OK, so that's fertilizing now. Another area where you can save a lot of time is when it comes to wedding. My experience, especially in Guatemala and then also having lived and worked in Colombia, what I have seen is a lot of energy and a lot of Labor is put into clearing the soil and having completely bare trees. They call it blatiando. So you make like a plate around the coffee trees and you completely expose the dirt and get rid of all of the weeds and there is no ground cover. Speaker 1 Right. I would imagine that takes a lot of Labor as well to remove all the ground cover from around the trees. Speaker 2 Exactly. It's it's really interesting and, and kind of backwards because it takes a lot of energy and effort to clear the trees. And as we've learned from earlier in the episode, by removing that cover crop, by removing that material on top of the soil, you are creating a moisture loss and we are destroying the microorganism activity in the soil that actually helps the trees access nutrients. Speaker 1 And actually, going back to Pallino Quintero, that's what he was also doing before he started working with the Coffee Quest. Speaker 7 But the coffee quest helped. Speaker 1 Him do a soil chromatography test and the results suggested to him that he had a lot less organic matter in his soil than he thought removing all that organic matter from the base of the trees was actually working against. Speaker 7 Him and so. Speaker 1 Now, to build back up the organic matter around his trees, he just trims the weeds down to about 3 to 5 centimeters. Speaker 7 Baunos operandi is saying some material organic. Speaker 1 With more organic matter in his soil, it helps increase the amount of life in the soil, it improves nutrient uptake, and on a farm as steep as his, it also helps reduce erosion. Speaker 2 So we recommend leaving behind the traditional approach where you completely clear the area around the coffee trees in favor of leaving some type of cover crop that allows you to maintain some of that moisture and maintain that organic matter and instead that trim the weeds around the tree a little bit more frequently. Speaker 1 And so coming back to Labour, actually, Paulino now has to pass through his trees more often with a weed sniper, but it's actually a much faster job than before. Speaker 2 So what some farmers are facing is this trade off. You may have to do a few more passes per year, but those passes could take you less time. And with a weed whacker, it's a relatively quick job. So it's a calculation that I think makes a lot of sense. OK. Speaker 1 So that's wedding. Now let's talk about spraying because there are times even on a well managed farm where even if you're cutting all the weeds down regularly, there might be a plant that's just growing too intensely that you have to hit with some herbicide. Aster Medina knows as well. She spoke about a particularly bad infestation of star grass. It's very aggressive, hard to eradicate and it climbs up the coffee trees themselves. Speaker 2 Now traditionally you kill star grass like this by spraying it with herbicide and this means that a worker has to have a tank on their back and spray a big mist which creates this like a fog of chemicals that surrounds the plant but also the person. Speaker 1 But this contact with potent agrochemicals is very bad for your health. When I was with the Coffee Quest community managers, they told me in that town of Santa Maria, you know, down in Huila, Colombia, it's frightening. People die often of agrochemical exposure. Speaker 7 In men of the messes do denos fru trejaliados and for cancer. Speaker 1 In the last two months, the Coffee Quest said that two of their partner producers had died from agrochemical exposure. Speaker 7 Comparte Medical Municipio. Speaker 1 And when they spoke to medical staff in the municipality, they said that these illnesses, this cancer was coming from excessive agrochemical use. And so This is why when the Coffee Quest speaks to their producer partners, they suggest using more biological solutions, trying to avoid heavy use of agrochemicals. But for some producers, sometimes you just can't avoid chemicals. And the trick is to use as little of them and to apply them safely. And going back to Arthur Medina, she's a huge fan from this other tool from Innovakit, the selector Dead Avensis. Think of it like a rolling pin that's attached to a long broom handle. The rolling pin is hollow and has all these little holes in it. And So what happens is that you roll the rolling pin along the ground directly over the weeds. You pour weed killer into the top of the tube and it drips directly onto the weeds. So it doesn't go up into the air, it doesn't go into your lungs, it costs just $50. And Hugo Lopez of Innova Kit explains that because you're not wasting all these chemicals into the air, because you're applying them directly onto the plants, you can dramatically reduce the amount of chemicals you need in the 1st place, 220 to 25 litres. Speaker 5 No. Speaker 1 Wow, that's huge. That's a huge difference. Speaker 2 So even for small producers, there are ways for you to boost your productivity using very low cost tools. We strongly recommend them because what you get back is your time, and your time is your most valuable asset. Essential Lessons for a Profitable Coffee Farm That was a lot of ground to cover. Let's quickly recap the things that we want producers to walk away from with this episode. Speaker 1 The first thing is you must measure your yields and understand your profitability. You can't improve what you're not tracking. Speaker 2 2nd is water. Coffee trees can underperform because they're water stressed at the wrong moment. Speaker 1 3rd Genetics don't gamble on an unproven variety just because they promise a high cup score. Speaker 2 4th Replanting. Don't bring in external money to fund it. Let the farm fund its own gradual transformation. Play it safe. 5th Nutrition. Speaker 1 The fertilizer advice you're going to hear from your National Coffee Association, it is the average for many thousands of farms. That average can be fatal for you. So get a soil test, get a leaf analysis, and figure out the nutritional needs for your specific trees. Speaker 2 6th cherry pulp. You have to deal with it one way or another, and if you compost it properly, it can strengthen your soil microbiology, which strengthens your tree's natural defenses and protects your yields. Speaker 1 And finally, tools. Reduce your productivity right now by using low cost tools and get back your time and your health. Speaker 2 Once you start putting all of this together, your farm's profitability will improve. It all comes down to management, and management is something that you can change. Thanks for hanging out with us in this first episode of Thriving Producer. We're really looking forward to having your company for the rest of the series. If you found this useful, I hope you'll share it. Speaker 1 In the show notes we have links to everything. Many many resources. Take a look, it's a book down there. Speaker 2 And we would have loved to have make this episode much, much longer because there's so much to talk about. So if your curiosity has been piqued, there are many more resources. Not just LinkedIn, the show notes, but other podcast episodes. For example, I have a whole hour with Lalo on my podcast making coffee with Lucia Solis. We talk more about his philosophy on agronomy and he gets to be really loose and candid. Speaker 1 I have also interviewed Lalo for my podcast Filter Stories. Lalo explained microbiology very, very well and what it actually takes to make organic farming work as a business. I've also separately been an episode of Coffee Genetics. We mentioned F1 varieties and I explore why trying to create climate resilient varieties takes so long. Speaker 2 Find us both on Instagram. James is at Filter Stories podcast and I'm at Lucia Solis. Speaker 1 But for both of us, a better way to hear what's going on is via our newsletters on my. Speaker 2 Newsletter I give updates on the harvest, on what's going on in the farm and any place that I have coffee available for sale. That's a really great resource also for future fermentation workshops and anything that I'm working on and. Speaker 1 On mine, I tell you kind of what documentaries are in the pipeline and what it takes to make a documentary like the one you just heard. This series of Thriving Producer was produced by Lucia Solis, Nick Hafner and myself. James Harper and I also made the music. Speaker 2 Gracias pursuit tiempo inos demos en El proximo episodio. Speaker 1 Thanks for listening, see you next time.