Getting COVID at the end of February/beginning of March was rough for my work here, as I was supposed to get to the two-day Producer Roaster Forum in Guatemala City at the beginning of the month. Instead, I lost an opportunity to meet other folks from coffee-producing countries and be able to add their insights to our knowledge. However, I was COVID-negative just in time to get to meet other Fulbrighters in Bogotá for a lunch at the Fulbright Commission. It was my first time at the Commission in 2 1/2 months and good to share research/teaching topics that are being worked on as well as experiences living here in Colombia/the city. For example, through my colleagues, I learned that my cedula de extranjaria (Foreigner ID) might actually be ready, despite Migración Colombia not notifying me over a month, despite being told they would (I made an impromptu trip the following Wednesday and found that it had just been sitting there, ready for pickup).
I also got to see Janina Grabs and Rita Mota of ESADE while they were briefly here in Colombia for coffee-related fieldwork of their own. Janina and I are both members in an international, interdisciplinary “Sustainable and Equitable Coffee Markets Research Group” and I was already familiar with some of her work through my industry friend, Kosta Kallivrousis. Both were invited by the dean of the Uniandes business school to present work, so aside from getting to chat one afternoon at Azahar Cafe, it was also nice to see their research presentations.
On Thursday, we had an interview with another company in the larger conglomerate that owns La Palma y El Tucán. Then the next day, we had a zoom interview with someone from another company in the group. And then early Saturday morning, we had another zoom with someone who was CEO of a company that offers various technology solutions (both high- and low-tech) to farmers.
Also that weekend, there was a “Hecho en Bogotá” festival at Parque 93, complete with craft booths, food/beer booths, and a live music stage. After 9 days of isolating in my flat waiting for two consecutive days of negative tests, it was a nice weekend to be out in the park, COVID-free, and enjoying some music (albeit at the expense of some work that I wanted to catch up on and tax prep).
The following week started spring break for Uniandes, so Andres and I had scheduled to depart for Neiva, capital city of Huila department. Huila (and Tolima) is one of the departments that is well known for high quality specialty coffee in Colombia. Our goal was to spend about 3 days/2 nights there visiting coffee farms and speaking with various actors in the specialty coffee value chain. That, we did.
(Here’s a carousel from my Google Photos album, but the widget does not show the captions, nor allow videos to play. Some of the photos are featured below and Andres has a few pictures which I still need to add.)
After an hour delay, on Tuesday, we left Bogotá around around 11am and ended up arriving in Neiva around 12. We were picked up at the airport by a private driver with a person who worked for one of the companies we interviewed the week before. We had about an hour-long interview in the truck as we drove out through the mountains east of Neiva. The drive was approximately 12 miles away from the airport as the crow flies, but the rough, windy roads to farms mean the crow never quite flies straight from the city; the trip took about 75 minutes.
We got to the hacienda, where we met the producer of the farm, as well as his wife, who made us some coffee. Andres and I had about an hour and a half interview with him, learning about the history of the farm, some of the business decisions he did/n’t make and why, and the various things that impact his farm’s business. Following the interview, he asked how I would normally brew coffee, took out a chemex, and made all of us coffee using the coffee from the farm.
Following that, we hiked up the farm from about 1600m to 1900m. The farm uses polyculture for regenerative agriculture. In between coffee crops, they also grow other produce such as plantains, oranges, avocados, and guama (ice cream bean, which looks almost like a cross between pawpaw and cacao). Like most farmers, they typically grow castillo, colombiana, red bourbon, and yellow bourbon varieties. And of course, as we’re learning more about the farm, about his production methods, and about his business strategies over 40 years of farming, we’re treated to some of the most amazing views of the coffee mountains.
Although Andres was interpreting during the interviews, I was genuinely trying to follow along in Spanish, which kicked my listening comprehension into gear (speaking is much harder, so one of the last language skills to fully develop), but was mentally exhausting. After a long day of travel, interviews/discussions, and hiking, we finally arrived back into town around 7. By that point (and with the 94/34º heat), I was just ready for dinner and bed. Andres and I debriefed over dinner and beer before I went to my room while he went next door to stay at his cousin’s.
Wednesday after breakfast, we were picked up by one of our producer interviewees from January. It was nice to be able to meet him and his partner in person after speaking extensively on Zoom. He took us to Cadefihuila, the roasting cooperative where his coffee is roasted (as well as coffee from the farm the day before), which is different from the cooperative to which he belongs as a producer.
Aside from getting to speak with one of the reps from the roasting cooperative for nearly an hour about the roasting cooperative business and considerations of how that business was run, we were also able to speak with the head roaster for about an hour and a half. It was really interesting getting to hear his perspective about roasting at origin and we were able to ask some additional questions about the roaster’s value-adding role as a “chef” of sorts– how client demands are weight against roasting skills, how the business of roasting is different at origin, and now value differs from roasting in the US. Again, a completely different perspective, not only from what I’ve seen in the US, but also from other actors at different parts of the value chain at origin.
We had lunch with our producer friend and his partner at a traditional Colombian parrilla, where I got a little break with some English, but most conversation was still Spanish.
After lunch, they dropped us off at Universidad Surcolombiana. The roaster at Cadefihuila mentioned that he had studied agronomical engineering there and, coincidentally, I had been conversing with one of the researchers that the roaster knew from the CESURCAFE (South Colombian Coffee Research Center) labs there. We were able to meet him and the lab coordinator in the afternoon to take a tour of the sensory analysis, microbiology, fermentation, and chemical analysis labs and discuss their coffee research and their relationships with the local industry, the FNC, and specialty coffee-at-large.
Again, most of the day was Spanish-language interviews/conversations that I was intently trying to understand myself and it was about 99/37º around 5pm when we left the university, so I went back to my 65/18º air conditioned hotel room and called home before walking around the mall next to my hotel, buying myself a souvenir, and then meeting Andres for dinner to debrief again.
Thursday after breakfast, we met for another 90-minute interview with the Federación Nacional’s Specialty Coffee Coordinator in charge of Huila. Again, it added more depth about the role of the FNC and its relationship with farmers, the specialty coffee production markets in Huila, and the continued pesky impact of the c-market price on the Colombian market and differences with the prices for specialty beans, relative to consumers.
We then took a cab to Corhuila (University Corporation of Huila), which housed CENIGAA (Center for Research in GeoAgro-Environmental Sciences and Resources Foundation), a small, fairly high-tech research center that uses drones, AI, databasing, and various agronomical tools to better improve crop yields and improve pricing. In February, we had interviewed a producer who was also working through CENIGAA, so we again, got to meet another of our interviewees in person. He helped shed some additional light on the financial details of the value chain and his own ability to work back reverse logistics to become a price-maker instead of a price-taker.
We also got into a discussion of the labor markets for transitory coffee pickers– still an invisible (yet costly) part of production that I wish I could unearth more deeply. If we are looking at coffee’s impact on the least of us, than the pickers should count as much as the growers. Yet harvest timing, language barriers, and my personal security (which is combined with language) are all inhibiting factors for access at this point.
Over a lunch of arroz con pollo, we discussed some of his personal background, as he had done his undergraduate in the US on a basketball scholarship and now currently working on a PhD in sustainable agronomy. And after that, he took us to the solar-powered roastery, where they roast for the various producers he works with.
We headed back to the airport at 4 for our 5pm flight, however when we got there, they said there was rain/hail in Bogotá, so our inbound flight would be late and we would have a 6pm departure. Andres called his cousin, who was nice enough to drive us around Neiva for an hour to kill time and see a bit more of the city.
But when we got back at 5, the flight not only hadn’t left yet, but it needed to go to Bogotá from Manizales first, meaning the flight was not leaving at 6 either. No, we finally took off from Neiva to Bogotá at 9pm. We got into Bogotá around 10pm and I got to have another half hour of Spanish conversation with my cab driver before another 15 min conversation with the doorman upon getting home.
Even though we were only in Neiva for about 2 1/2 days, we probably ended with nearly 10-12 hours of recorded interviews and more context (again, I’ve purposefully obscured some of those discussions publicly for the time being here). One thing we’ve found is that the specialty coffee industry has potential to create opportunity for farmers to increase their incomes, yet that potential comes with a lot of risk– global warming risk, investing risk, and the risk of the majority of buyers continuing to be price-makers, thereby making demands of farmers. Each piece of the work leads to more thinking and more insight for us to analyze. My time here may be finite, but I’m not sure this work is…
Leave a Reply