First Pick of coffee

Picking coffee

Sunday  and Monday July 24 & 25, several workers came to pick coffee.  Miguel was their leader.  His English is okay, but he tends to smile a lot and shake his head, which I later discovered was his way of saying “I have no idea what to say”.  He was the hardest worker, however, and the front man for the crew.

The first day the pickers started at the top of the farm (1,500 ft. elevation).  We saw them, children in tow, each picking into a waist high plastic container strapped to their shoulders.  There were several cars parked along the bare spots off the driveway.  Both days were very sunny, which has been unusual, actually.  It was very hot, or as the workers found sitting under a tree told David, muy caliente.

First night in shed

Miguel took 11 burlap bags for the workers to fill from the waist containers.  7 filled bags were stored in the work shed overnight.  Each worker had their own number on their bag.  Miguel ended up with two full bags, 210 lbs.  Sunday, the workers picked further down the hill closer to the farmhouse.  We heard lively talking amongst themselves, music, and children.  I imagine one of the kids made the stone cairn tower.  

Loading coffee bags

We learned the mill would close at 4:30pm.  The pickers finished about 1:00pm, loaded up all the bags into Miguel’s SUV, and off we went to follow him to Koa Farms mill house.  It is on Koa Rd, a narrow winding paved one lane road.  Paved means trucks can use the road.  We had to turn off to let a big truck come up the hill as we were going down.

Unloading at Koa Farms mill

Bags inside mill

Koa Farms has a big building with a loading dock where you drop off the coffee.  It is still very early to harvest coffee, so it was empty looking.  Our load of coffee was taken off the back of the truck.  Each individual bag was weighed in numerical order, calling out the total weight for each number, which means each separate picker.  The average amount per picker was about 75 pounds.  The pickers are paid $.45 per pound.  The mill bought this fresh picked coffee for $1.15 per pound.   We brought in 927 pounds.  They deduct one pound per bag.  I thought that was too high, until I carried the empty bags back to the car.

Calculations

Coffee weighing by picker

The first picking is usually not that good quality, for various reasons.  One, you have to pick because there are red cherries, but not very many per tree.  So in order for the workers to pick enough to make it worth their while, they pick orange and yellow cherries as well.  In other words, they are not so discriminating with their fingers.  Later, when the main part of the crop starts to ripen, there will be more red cherries per tree and thus more red will be picked.  So this first pick, the cherry was sold to the mill.  Later pickings, with a higher percentage of red, the coffee will be processed, not sold.

Coffee cherries in carts

After the weighing and calculations are finished, the cherries are poured out of the bags into wheelbarrow like carts.  We don’t know where they go after that.  Koa owns the coffee now.  But we were told that since it is less than 4,000 pounds, it will be processed differently than in a larger batch.

The mill will not buy or process coffee from our farm again for at least two weeks.  I’m not sure why that is, but it gives us two weeks of quiet during the day.

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