Kona Coffee Farming: Escape or Reality? · Thursday April 23, 2009 by colin newell
What actually makes a Kona coffee farmer, who are they, why are they doing it, or just for the mental exercise: Could I too become a filthy rich, days-in-the-sun, surfing, shooting-the-breeze Hawaiian coffee farmer? This is a highly subjective, behind the scenes explanation of the most pressing question folks seems to have on their minds when they meet one of us coffee dudes. So for the sake of it, let’s categorize:
Cherry farms
are often held by the same family over three or four generations. These farms originated to provide additional income to the day jobs working the sugar cane fields in the 19th century. The high number of children and grandparents enabled the owners to do the unpaid coffee field work in the mornings, evenings and Sundays. Most Kona coffee is grown in the vicinity of family farmer’s residences; planted between rocks in irregular patterns, ranging from 100 to 1,000 trees per acre, often interspersed with other crops and some shade trees. Nearly all is sold as freshly picked coffee cherries to large processors, who also throw in a few bags of free fertilizer. The parcels range between 1 to 5 acres and are often leased in 40 year terms. This is and always has been the backbone of the Kona coffee industry. None of the farmers has to worry about government inspections regarding pesticide or herbicide usage, or coffee quality standards. The cheap lease of the land, which requires some agricultural practices, justifies the small profit. Living and housing in Hawaii is expensive and the rural lifestyle eases the financial burden a bit. Most cherry farmers have a Japanese, Phillipine or Hawaiian background and reside in the South Kona district. Age group: 50 – 90, 2 to 3 family generations under one roof. Many are members of the Kona Pacific Farmers Coop and not linked to any farmers organization. No web presence or farm tours offered.
Coffee Plantations
in Kona are increasing in size, but there are only a few names in this category. All are owned by corporations or individuals with financial backing from the mainland. Their sizes range from 20 to 60 acres, and often contain other outlying parcels. In this production system recommended seedlings are used, the rocky land is being bulldozed, row planting, proper cover crops, mulching, manuring, weeding, and pruning methods are practiced. Nearly all use chemical fertilizers and herbicides as they are purely profit driven. Their coffees are always inspected and certified by the State. Most of their harvested coffees end up as highly profitable “Kona Blends” to duped tourists, who believe this coffee being pure Kona beans. The rest is sold to green coffee brokers in Japan and the US mainland. In addition to their own production they buy from smaller farms freshly picked coffee cherries at a fluctuating per pound price. They also pulp, drymill and grade coffee for farmers lacking the required big equipment. When buying from them look for their private labels, otherwise you’ll get the coffee pooled from many farms. Traditionally these large plantations in Hawaii went bust in recessions because of their high overheads. Some of them are in serious trouble right now and seem to be running short of cash, not being able to pay the cherry farmers on time as required by law. Owners and managers are nearly all long time Caucasian residents of Hawaii, who are experienced with the local political culture. They organize in the Hawaii Coffee Association and Hawaii Coffee Grower’s Association to maintain the faulty legal status of the Kona Blend laws. Age group: 35 to 65; ‘good old boys’ networkers; SCAA members and exhibitors; all offer guided farm tours, farm stores, and professional websites. Their Kona coffees and Kona Blends have a strong presence in US mainland and Hawaiian stores.
Gentlemen farms
or “Snowbird farms” grow coffee on their properties as a hobby, as a tax incentive or because a vacation property is zoned as ‘agricultural’. One can completely relinquish the actual work to one of the larger plantations, who then in turn provide some roasted coffee upon request just in case the owner wants to sell a few bags under his/her own label. These types of farms are not meant to be profitable but this doesn’t indicate if their coffees are good, bad or excellent. Some are organically cultivated. The owners have other sources of income and only reside part time in Kona. Under US tax law a property qualifies as a ‘farm’ when generating more than $1,000 in sales p.a. Gentlemen farmers are mostly Caucasians who strife for living a calm, easy Hawaiian life and have a story to tell when asked for what they are doing all day long. Geographically in the North Kona district centered around Holualoa. The 55 to 80 year old group consists of retired, married couples, single women. They have no professional affiliation or only nominally memberships at the Kona Coffee Council and the Kona Coffee Farmers Association. Some have websites and generally no farm tours are offered by them.
Boutique farms
are yet another category but constitute the fastest growing segment. The vertical integration of the growing, processing and direct marketing to the customer and owning all means of production is essential. A small profit margin is indeed possible but it needs a multidisciplinary approach by the owners to keep any outsourcing to a bare minimum. About a quarter of them practice organic farming and they are environmentally concerned. Yet the combination of advancing age, hard physical labor and lack of computer literacy are challenging for many. But also big egos nurtured in prior high flying professions stand in their way: farming makes you humble but not instantaneously. A number of these farms defaulted during the current recession, because their owners overlooked that equipment needs to amortize and public awareness of Kona coffee was always low. Building a solid customer base for a farm takes approximately 5 years. Learning the ins and outs of coffee farming about 3 years. This group of farmers sees the faulty Kona Blend law as the largest stumbling block to a higher price for Kona coffee. Yet they oppose quality control and state inspections of their product, which doesn’t fly with the government. Owners are mostly mainland Caucasians and are sometimes married into Hawaiian families with various ethnic backgrounds. One can meet a colorful assortment of the human species in this group: The aging hippie, the retired colonel, the liberal professor, the activist lawyer, the Silicon Valley mini tycoon. They organize occasionally and challenge the legal status quo of the legislature. Age group: 40 to 75, couples, gay couples, single women, single guys. Affiliation: Kona Coffee Farmers Association or none. Mostly homemade webstores, shop presence in a few Hawaiian stores, farm tours offered upon requests.
There you have it. None of this background info indicates that a particular Kona coffee tastes better than the other! As long as it’s not a ‘blend’ or fake of course. The border lines between the categories are also not so well defined as one farm can be a ‘boutique’ but also offers processing. Or it could appear like a large plantation with managers and all, but is held afloat by the partnership income of a big time law office in L.A. Or a fourth generation Japanese cherry farm made it successfullly into the cyberage with a dazzling webstore.
Kona coffee beans grow regardless and despite of the local politicking on their behalf. A coffee tree doesn’t judge its farmer by skin color, age, sexual orientation or prior profession. Just if it gets its leaves properly tickled from time to time…
Joachim always tries to tickle the leaves of the BLUE HORSE KONA COFFEE trees the way they like it. Their farm in South Kona was developed from pure cherry farming into a boutique/family farm, but also offers wet processing and sun drying to neighbor farms.
happy coffee trees have good haircuts · Thursday February 5, 2009 by colin newell
Tropical vegetation growth is steady year round – if one species has a dormant month, there’s another one ready to take its space immediately. For a tropical farmer it means a never-ending battle against nature taking control: cutting, weeding, whacking, clearing, ripping, mowing, pruning, breaking, picking. Vastly different than in the temperate climate zone where distinct seasons allow, even demand, more organized work.
What’s called ‘pruning season’ in Kona coffee land is actually a matter of life and death for the trees. A coffee tree can kill itself by overbearing, and our region is known for producing the highest amount per tree and the largest beans anywhere in the world. So in this very unique, more than ideal Kona coffee tree climate one doesn’t destroy, but creates by cutting things off.
The last beans are picked, pulped, dried and securely packed away in the storage rooms to age for a few months. The trees look literally wasted – many branches are stripped of leaves, sporting barren, broken twigs, a few forgotten coffee cherries dangling somewhere at the top, mostly dried up to what we call ‘raisins’. New green shots sprout on those old, bent over, spent arms. If left to themselves, cultivated kona typica trees will soon return to be tall, wild unsightly shrubs with lots of new wood, but little coffee to harvest from.
It’s the way a tree grows on its own and a coffee farmer tries to tame this very nature year round to make it behave ‘unnatural’; meaning giving more fruit than it would need to produce to help its species survival.
Not much different from a vintner or apple orchard owner: The plant should conclude that it’s best to produce as many fruits as possible. Every year. We farmers fool them into thinking that there is an abundance of fertile space, water and right amount of sun around, by carefully pruning, fertilizing, watering and adjusting shade trees. Keeping the right bugs around and the wrong ones away. Protecting the soil from erosion and the winds from breaking its branches. Bringing in beehives to pollinate or even observing moon phases to up the yields in spiritual ways, if one is so inclined. All comes down to that if the tree is happy, you’ll harvest some very, very happy coffee beans from it.
When I walk out there to trim the old branches from our 2,500 trees it’s the dry season in Kona. Sunny days from dusk to dawn with barely a gentle breeze. None of the usual afternoon clouds rising from the ocean along the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano. One wants to catch the first light at 6 AM till about 10 when it gets really hot. And after 4PM till 6 when it cools down again. Because it is hard work, and it needs careful, concentrated examination of each trees’ unique constellation of branches: Which ones to cut and which ones not to. Then a short burst of energy with a very sharp handsaw to cut the 3” wide, about 5‘ long old or withered branches off. Selecting one or two new shoots, which should not be damaged by the saw blade. The other ones are being broken off at the base, or ‘suckered’ as they call it here. Then it needs dragging the cutoff branches out to the nearest path, two or three at a time, mostly uphill over rocky terrain. Stumbling, cursing, getting scratched, a tad more cursing. Piling them up where the wood chipper can reach them easily.
After ten trees, twenty or so branches one is drenched in sweat. Then it gets nasty with the crab spiders, which love to spin their orbs in this season. And they cling to a sweaty neck or forehead when dragging the branches out. Short legged arachnids they are, their pea size bodies accumulate mostly underneath ones shirt collar. Where they decide to bite you. Somewhere in pain level between a mosquito and a bee; but no visible redness or swelling. Those come from the spider mites, which fall down from the top of the dried branches and itch for days after having burrowed into your skin.
In a while the tangled mess of the post harvest orchard opens up and one can see the spacing of the trees, the beautiful, shy kalij pheasants running around, find a forgotten wooden picking hook from the harvest season, an empty burlap bag which was never filled with coffee cherries, slowly deteriorating in the rains.
On a good day I prune and sucker about hundred trees. And drag, pile up the branches where the chipper can get to it. Then my concentration wanes and I make mistakes by cutting off a wrong branch, or missing a few. The beauty of farm life is that there’s always something else to be done, screaming for attention, a different muscle to use, a different way to focus, or something stupid or repetitive activity for a change. Should I deal with HTML code on our website or the jeeps transmission fluid problem? Mow the lawn or prep the soil analysis for the Ag Service lab?
A well-pruned coffee tree gives an optimum amount of coffee cherries. It utilizes the air and space surrounding the leaves and branches fully. Pruning is to understand the inherent architecture, the metabolism of the tree; foreseeing the next few month’s growth and the next 2 year’s direction a branch will take; helping bent over branches to steady themselves by weaving them into the adjacent twigs. The thick gnarly, many times altered stump of an old growth Kona coffee tree is a piece of art in itself. A tree cut back over 120 pruning seasons simply is a bonsai piece in its own way: Full of cuts, swellings, holes, stumps, twirls and turns – a symphony in wood. They say ‘form follows function’, here the function is shaped by forming, shaping the growth. A coffee tree is pruned at knee height, from where the branches are easily bendable towards the pickers during harvest. The first generations of Japanese Kona coffee farmers preferred climbing on ladders and let the verticals grow up to 10, 15 meters. Accidents by toppling down with a thirty pound basket of coffee cherry strapped to the waste was common. It’s not a cushiony fall on Kona lava rocks and an hours worth of work is spilled between the dirt, stones and leaves. Those days on the ladder are gone thanks to more finessed pruning methods their children developed when they took over the farms. It still isn’t easy labor, but looking at a happy, smiling coffee tree sporting it’s new seasonal hair, err… ‘branch’ cut is very much so.
Joachim Oster is a coffee farmer and owner (with his lovely wife Demetria and daughter Athena…) of Blue Horse Kona Coffee Farm in Kealakekua, Hawaii (near Captain Cook). His writing will periodically grace the pages of the CoffeeCrew Blog – and for that we are eternally grateful!
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Quest 4 The Best · Tuesday January 20, 2009 by colin newell
The ‘best’ is not necessarily the most expensive. The ‘best’ is not necessarily the luxury-labelled product. The ‘best’ is actually always only known to an insider. Make that ‘only known to you’. Because the real ‘best’ is subjective and everybody somewhat in tune with their inner self knows when this personal ‘best’ has been found.
Same with whatever the ‘best’ coffee might be. Divorces were filed over badly brewed ones and first borns cut out of wills because of the wrong filter paper. So the serving of self-grown coffee to a coffee guru of Colin Newells’ caliber can make even the sturdiest coffee farmer shiver in his muddy boots. Yet when Colin and his darling Andrea tasted our beans on our Hawaiian coffee farm, he included the very four letter word in his compliment:
“Best Kona I’ve tasted.”
What-, whose? Ours?! The shivering stopped immediately, which was nice. Upon Colin’s question what we think makes our Kona beans so good, I had to admit that a big part is certainly the very setting surrounding him. Like the nameless wine served from a simple carafe in a small village in the Provence or Tuscany after having hiked the cobble-stoned streets- this wine happens always to be the very best, because it feels and tastes just right. Right for that particular moment and place. Yet with a taste which belongs to something bigger and transcends, elevates one. So the ‘best coffee’ is not what we claim to grow (albeit we like to hear it), but I felt that it was also the special moment in time what Colin meant when he stated it.
Breathing the silky Hawaiian air, tasting the purity of our fresh rain water, the view of the verdant green hills covered with coffee bushes surrounding him, and the awareness that everything around contributed to this very coffee drinking experience. Watching the chickens who pick the bugs out of our orchard, the lush grass being alive under his feet, the sun which right then when it got too hot to bear got hidden by shade spending afternoon clouds, that he can ask the farmers how they found the place and what they would have to do tomorrow, hearing the rake going through the rustling parchment drying in the sun, sensing the history of the area, taking in the scenery. All that was his personal ‘best’- our coffee only being the accelerator, the oil in the gears.
Yesterday when you shelled out the big bucks for premium brands, a large portion of what you paid for was the actual product – today you are paying largely for marketing. But marketing campaigns do not make real luxury. The real luxury is finding these particular moments in time for yourself, for your friends, for when life is in sync. It may be the cappuccino with that formidable person on a rainy afternoon in a smokey cafe: We may hear you say that this is the best cappuccino you ever had. But what you meant is that you really feel good about where you are and who you are with.
Colin asked me to write from time to time about what we are doing here on our Kona coffee farm, our day-to-day farmer life, noteworthy experiences and news from the island. I wrapped my head around it of how to find an angle so that it would not be understood as a sales pitch or marketing (because we happen to sell our coffee as well). Having a cup of coffee is great fuel for experiencing the aforementioned particular moments; many magical moments are happening by farming and processing coffee as well. So I’ll try to share one or the other with you in the weeks to come. Of course what hopefully will be a simple, good read can certainly be enhanced with having your very personal ‘best’ coffee along with it.
Joachim Oster is a coffee farmer and owner (with his lovely wife Demetria and daughter Athena…) of Blue Horse Kona Coffee Farm in Kealakekua, Hawaii (near Captain Cook). His writing will periodically grace the pages of the CoffeeCrew Blog – and for that we are eternally grateful!
Hawaii vacation blogging - memories are made of this · Monday January 19, 2009 by colin newell
My sister, Toni, just asked me…
“What were some of the best memories of your Hawaii vacation?”
Good question.
For starters…
-eating a simple birthday dinner on the lanai watching the
Sun go down… Hale Kona Kai condo – Kona, Hawaii
-making breakfast every morning; granola, fresh papaya, and an omelette
-snorkeling with brilliant tropical fish
-sitting on a patio surrounded by coffee plants… while drinking the
coffee from the plants – Blue Horse Kona Farm near Captain Cook, Hawaii
-drinking beer at the Kona Brewing Company and eating pizza while
a mongoose mooches the table
-self guided tour at Greenwell Farms, surrounded by Avocado, Grapefruit, lemon
and breadfruit trees…
-drinking coffee at Island Lava Java on Alii Drive, Kona
-Eating shave ice at the North Shore of Oahu
-Eating at a Shrimp cart in Oahu
-Enjoying a plate lunch at a dodgy Honolulu bar and grill
-Eating a plate of nachos at Charters Marina pub next to the Illikai Marina, Waikiki
-Standing in line waiting to get into the Wailana Coffee House – a “Denny’s” on steroids,
4 times the size of our Denny’s talking to Canadian snow birds from Swift Current, Saskatchewan
-Watching a tropical thunderstorm
-Flashing the shaka hand gesture at a complete stranger
-Waikiki trolley tour… pretty much any part of it.
-Walking Bishop’s museum, Honolulu
and my favorite…
-Finding Andrea 13 minutes after getting lost in downtown Waikiki…
Moderately terrifying, but a satisfying reunion.
