Fruit, Fertiliser, Disease and Coffee

There is never a dull moment here at Finca Tio Conejo. The main harvest for 2015 is barely a month away and there is plenty of work to be done. Construction, renovations, planting, fertilizing, and general plant and building maintenance is keeping the five full time cafeteros, as well as Ivanov, Esperanza and Johana (and myself!) working tirelessly here at the farm.

I have only been here for a couple of days, but in my short time here at the farm I have had a chance to see quite a bit. The 20 000 odd mature coffee trees here are interspersed with countless fruit trees, including banana, mandarin, papaya, orange, yucca and numerous lesser known and largely uncultivated natives. This polycropping provides many benefits; diversity of plant species attracts a diversity of animal species, which helps to naturally control insects that attack coffee shrubs. Large trees with deep root structures help to strengthen and retain topsoil, which in turn helps retain the nutrients and carbon (fun fact-60% of sequestered carbon is in the top one metre of soil)  vital to plant development. These trees also nourish the soil by giving back nutrients that are absorbed by the coffee shrubs. And best of all, there is never a shortage of delicious fruit and fruit juice at the farm!

Banana trees interspersed with coffee in a section of the farm

All the leftover food scraps, pulp from harvested coffee and organic matter from general farm work ends up in one of the five composting areas. These are well maintained, regularly turned and monitored to ensure that the best compost ends up fertilizing the coffee. According to a podcast I was listening to a few weeks ago, soil immediately begins to repair itself and retain carbon at exponential increments, which helps with water retention and nutrient retention, with only a ¼ inch of compost thrown onto the topsoil! And insects don’t like healthy plants as much as unhealthy ones, which means less pesticides. So the guys here are doing all the right things to keep their coffee healthy in an environmentally friendly way.

Despite the team’s best efforts, these trees aren’t completely immune to insects and diseases. All the mature trees here on the farm are of the Caturra varietal, which is renowned for its quality in the cup but also its susceptibility to disease. Last year Tio Conejo lost 10-15% of its mature coffee trees to roya, or coffee rust, which is caused by an insidious fungus that first arrived to Colombia in 1983. According to Don Ivanov, the team here learnt a lot about managing pesticide spraying routines and understanding how weather patterns affect the spread of the disease, so with any luck roya won’t have such a devastating impact of the farm in the future.

Roya isn’t the only problem facing Tio Conejo, or coffee producers globally for that matter. La broca, or the coffee borer beetle, has been making inroads in parts of the farm this year. The beetle burrows into the coffee cherry and lays its eggs inside, spoiling the fruit and the coffee bean inside. Yesterday Don Jon and I went out and hand-picked the affected cherries- a laborious and time consuming task- to halt the spread of the disease through the farm. Thankfully only one in every few hundred cherries- most likely even less- had the telltale signs of a broca, a needle-like hole at the base of the cherry. And this was only a small section of the farm, so it’s not all bad news!

The needle-like hole at the base of the cherry in the middle is from a borer beetle

The team here at the farm have recently planted some more disease-resistant shrubs. The Tabi (which means “good” in Guambiano) varietal is a relatively new one, release by CENICAFE (the National Centre for Coffee Investigation) in 2002 in order to better combat the spread of coffee rust in Colombia. It is a hybrid of Typica, Bourbon and Timor Hybrid, but unlike many other coffee hybrids it has an excellent flavor in the cup. With any luck the Tabis here on the farm will be producing coffee for the main harvest in 2017.

A few Tabi saplings. Hopefully they will be giving fruit this time in two years

In addition to recently planting Tabi, last year the team also planted around 4000 Gesha shrubs. Gesha has an outstanding reputation for its delicacy and nuanced flavours, and regularly fetches very high prices on the international market. Hopefully we will see some coffee coming from the Geshas in the 2017 fly crop harvest.

In addition to tending to the trees, there has been a lot of other work being done on the farm this week. Don Eulises and I built new vegetable boxes, planted some seeds and transplanted some mature vegetables for consumption by the workers here on the farm. There are re-flooring operations going on in some of the houses on the farm, and the growth of the business has required an expansion of the office space, so there is a lot of moving of furniture, computers and paperwork being done between the old and new offices. As I said earlier, there is never a dull moment here at the Café Tio Conejo finca.

One of the new vegetable boxes at the finca. The mesh cover is to protect the seedlings from birds, hail and heavy rain