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-1

Let 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.

The property before the clearing, JJanuary 2018

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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.

Typica plants, Agnep Heritage Farms, July 6, 2019
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