Finca de Cafe

Coffee does not come from Starbucks. Mention Starbucks here and nobody even knows the name.




We all know this, but when we visited the beautiful Finca Ocaso near Salento we really gained an appreciation for all the work that it takes to produce quality ORGANIC coffee.

Almost everything seems to be done by hand because the land is very steep and tractors simply would not work.

The work begins with the planting of the coffee beans in seed beds filled with river sand. Four months later the best seedlings are transplanted into pots filled with the rich local soil. After eight months in a greenhouse they are transplanted out into the finca.



At the age of 33 months the little bush begins producing fruit, and produces continuously. Every 2 weeks for the next 4 years the coffee must be harvested - only the red cherries, not the green, and all by hand. OUr tour guide Marcos shows pictures of how coffee is mechanically harvested in Brazil and explains that is why their coffee is so inferior for drinking.

After 4 years of production the plants can be cut back for resprouting. This process requires 18 months to 3 years depending on how it's done, and then coffee can be harvested from that plant again for another 3 years.

This finca uses only one chemical input and that is a small amount of phosphate fertilizer that is added to a kilogram of organic compost during the planting process.

During the harvest 20 to 30 pickers each pick about 200 Kg of coffee berries per day, for which they are paid about 400 pesos per Kg. So a good picker can make 40 to 50 dollars per day in US dollars.

All of the coffee processing, including separation of the bean from the cherry, removal of the "mucilage" from the bean, and solar drying of the beans.

There are so many types of coffee defects that are removed by hand, and amazingly at the end there is about a ton of coffee harvested per hectare (2.45 acres).

Marcos served a cup of his best proudly at the end of our tour. And offered to help us buy and operate the finca next door.

Thoughts of living in a small hacienda out in this stunningly beautiful part of Colombia have spun in our heads ever since. The wildlife and birds are plentiful here (fox, coyote, ocelot, parrots). The water comes directly out of the high mountains east of here and is absolutely pure.

What a pleasant dream.

Organic Ecuador - NOT

In forums, blogs and articles Ecuador is touted as being ever so organic. Well we're not so sure about that at this point.

We arrived in Cuenca on the 11th, found a sweet place to stay for a couple of days.  Then we headed out by bus to see a place that we really wanted to check out: Paute.  Really just a dot on a map though lower elevation, warmer, and agriculturally oriented.

After the hour plus bus ride there, we jumped out of the bus and onto the sidewalk, once again bewildered by yet another maze of streets, stores, homes, wandering dogs and speeding cars - but this time a much smaller town.

Right away we found the town marketplace.  Unfortunately the vendors were few and far between due to the "festival."  What festival?!  Apparently a large town on the coast thought up a reason to have a festival that day and even though it pertained only to that particular town, the town of Paute also opted to celebrate.  Cute.

We wandered around musing at the selection of fruits and vegetables - wondering what a number of them actually are.  The vendors would tell us the names but our heads are so full of new Spanish words that the names slide out one ear as quickly as they slide in the other.  No matter, there will be time for memorizing later.  I so wanted to buy many of the cool looking fresh produce items, but I had no place to prepare it.  No matter, there will be time for sampling later.

We bought some fruits, including a "tree tomato", some bananas, and peaches, sat down in the market and pigged out.

Back to the organic concept: I'd say that probably at least one out of every five storefronts in Paute is an agricultural or feed store.  Finding this quite curious, we stopped in to talk to a friendly looking man tending a seed and feed joint.

We asked him about the use of chemicals by local farmers.  See, we were curious about it because the country is touted as being ever so organic in its practices.  But we couldn't figure out how that could be the case.  It just isn't logical.  It's as though people think that farming chemicals haven't made it this far into the so-called 3rd world yet.

Chatting with Luis, a man who partially makes his living by selling fertilizer and insecticides to farmers and partially in growing produce himself, we learned the fallacy of the Organic Ecuadorian Farmer myth.

He says it wouldn't be so bad if the farmers would use the insecticides, pesticides and fertilizers as recommended on the directions - but they don't.  According to Luis, chemicals are very much over-used without regard to any instructions or safety for themselves.

Consequently, his wife explains, those beautiful yucca that we had been admiring in the market (she had seen us there), could actually be FULL of chemicals in spite of how beautiful they appear.  But yes, there ARE organic growers in the region and on two days a week they sell produce in the Paute marketplace under the name of "Agri-ecologicos". 

Granted, ONE agricultural supply vendor/medium scale farmer's opinion is just that . . . but me thinks he has some experience in this arena.  

So as always, wash your produce and consider ways of detoxing.  That's what we learned about organic produce in Ecuador.