Harvesting coffee

I arrived in Simonesia at the tail end of the coffee harvest. My timing couldn't have been better.

During the middle of the harvest season, farmers are known to start working as early as 4:00 a.m. and work all day into the night plucking beans off the plant. They spend all day maneuvering on the steep, often slippery, slopes that the coffee is planted on, which can be made even more harrowing by the early morning or late-evening darkness.

Luckily, the family that I was staying with did not start working at such hours. In fact, I was typically the first one out of bed in the morning. After a good breakfast of their own coffee and corn bread, we headed out to the fields.

The equipment used to harvest the beans will vary, depending on the area's climate.  One area that I visited uses a gas-powered coffee harvester that is fashioned out of a weed-whacker. Instead of a spinning blade, they use a rake attachment. They place the tool in the branches and rake out the beans. This tool is great for harvesting all the beans on a plant at once.

The first farm I stayed at to harvest coffee is in a slightly colder and more humid climate. The beans took longer to ripen and did not do so uniformly. You might find that half of the beans on the plant are red or yellow (ready to harvest), while the rest of them were still green. These kinds of plants must be harvested manually. Luckily there have been some technological breakthroughs in manual coffee harvesting in the last few years that make it a much more pleasant experience. (Always pick the beans pulling away from the plant so the same bud will be able to produce next year)

To harvest the beans, you place tarp on the grown below the trees you are going to harvest. Then you pluck the beans, and they fall onto the tarp. Once you have finished harvesting the plants under the tarp, you move the tarp along the row of coffee plants to the next ones you are going to harvest.

At the end of the row, you separate out the sticks and leaves that also fell onto the tarp and put the fresh beans into a sack. If dry, the beans can stay in the sack in the field for three or four hours before they begin to lose quality.  (This is probably why they have a coffee break every few hours)

When you have accumulated enough sacks, you will carry them over to a drying area, where they will sit in the sun for about 11 days. There are also machines that dry coffee beans in less than two days, if you are in a rush.

At that point, the beans leave the farm. They are put into sacks to be taken to a de-pulping place and/or sold.