Budding coffee producers dreaming of shade-grown Benguet Arabica in the Cordillera range of mountains in the Philippines.
That perfect cup of coffee you are sipping, touch many hands. In our farm, at least 30 pairs of hands bring you our award winning coffee from digging to storing before it goes to roasting. Around 67% are women. Paying tribute to our coffee farmers , helpers and family members as they help us with our coffee production since 2018. Our coffee production are the following
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.
We had to clear the land first so we could plant in between the trees.
