Let me share some videos I took in our coffee farm. It’s our fourth year of planting and I want to share the progress of our coffee plants.
Here is an introduction to Agnep Coffee Farm.
Videos: Our coffee farm
Digitalization is more than digital solutions for agriculture.
Digitalization for agriculture (D4Ag) is more than digitization for agriculture. It is more than digital solutions for agriculture. Dr. Benjamin Kwasi Addom, digital agriculture strategist at the Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands talked on “the concept of digitalization and smallholder agriculture” at a virtual workshop on digital agriculture for women entrepreneurs. Organized by the Asian Productivity Organization, in cooperation with the National Productivity Council of India, participants from the Philippines, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam joined this three-day workshop from Nov. 4 to 6, 2020.
How to plant Arabica coffee
We are grateful to the Bureau of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture, Regional Field Office of the Cordillera Administrative Region (DA-RFO CAR) through the Regional High Value Crop Development Program (HVCDP) Coordinator Joan Dimas-Bacbac for the coffee seedlings they provided for us since we started in 2018.
The first question that hit my mind in January 2018 was how do I plant coffee? My husband and I met up with Professor Val Macanes on March . Macanes gave useful tips such as that the “Base of fertilization is very important. At least 5 kilos of chicken manure per hole (1,200 per hectare). Digging should be half a meter by half a meter.” He even gave us a production guidebook, but I wanted more context on the steps.
What helped me is this “Production Guide for Arabica Coffee” from Bote Central. You can download it here. I liked that it had a lot of illustrations, which gave me a head start. The guide also helped me teach the coffee farmers by showing the illustrations. It would be on July 2018 when I would get a formal training from the Benguet State University (BSU). The training workshop was called “Pre-production management, Quality Enhancement of Coffee Product from Seed to Cup.”
Production-Guide-for-Arabica-Coffee-by-Bote-Central-Inc-Maker-of-Coffee-Alamid-1Let me show you what we did. On the slopes of the family ancestral land , lies a dense, oak-dominated cloud forest (or kalasan) together with the Benguet Pine trees.
Clearing. the land
We had to clear the land first so we could plant in between the trees.
Benguet Arabica: Our heritage, and its history
We started our farm in 2018 not knowing, the family’s history of planting arabica in the early 1900’s.
We just planted Typica seedlings sourced from the mountains above our farm. Before my daughters and I planned a coffee farm in January 2018, we were unaware that there were backyard coffee plants tucked away at the ancestral place of my husband’s family in Benguet.
Blockchain coffee, please
Blockchain and coffee — sounds cool. No, this is not bitcoin, the cryptocurrency as part of a coffee shop’s payment app. When I order a cup of coffee, I ask for the origin and sometimes even the farmer. As a budding coffee producer, I know how challenging it is to plant Arabica. I have not even reached the post-harvesting or roasting stage. Picture this. From bean to cup, it takes 15 steps to get you that perfect cup of coffee. Forty Hands Coffee in Singapore took its name from the 40 hands it takes to produce a coffee from seed to cup.
I chanced upon a “Blockchain Coffee” episode on The Coffee Podcast from Spotify. The world’s first coffee blockchain auction, was launched in partnership with Yave (Yave.io), a blockchain trading application startup, and Guatemalan Coffees. The auction offered the possibility of “faster payment for farmers, immutable traceability, and unprecedented market access breakthroughs.”
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