Our attitudes have changed towards our coffee. We are inspired to revive our reputation from the 1970s for producing excellent quality coffee. It is now our main cash crop and it is helping us to pay school fees, medical expenses and build our homes.
We traditionally only produced Natural Arabica as there were no central washing stations in our region. But over the last few years, we have invested in 36 micro-washing stations in our communities, to fully-wash and process our coffee, and to realise its full potential. And we have attended training sessions to become experts in coffee processing.
‘Adapting to climate change’
We are proud to make sustainability the focus for all of our activities and there is an abundance of life and diversity to be found on our farms. We intercrop our coffee with bananas, beans, fruit trees, coco-yams, vanilla, passion fruit, and mango trees. We have innovation programmes to support our farmers, including the ‘Boar goat Project’. A Boar goat is given to a farmer and the manure from it is added in our coffee fields as compost, leading to better soil fertility. In this way, it helps to boost coffee yields and to improve the soil.
We are living with the effects of climate change on a daily basis. We are noticing more erratic weather patterns, such as heavy storms that cause soil erosion and even landslides. We have started taking measures to adapt to the challenges, building contour channels into the hillsides for moisture retention and to prevent erosion.