#Which fruit farming is most profitable in Kenya?

[twiganews]

How to Make Apple Farming in Kenya Profitable

Apple farming in Kenya is a profitable agribusiness venture,this is because of the high increase in demand of the fruit. The high demand in the country is brought about by enormous health benefits associated by the precious fruit. Most apple fruits found in the market currently are imported from South Africa, although recently, there has been an increase in apple production from local farmers.

Apple fruits health benefits

Apple is a very nutritious fruit that is high in fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants. They are an excellent source of vitamin C, magnesium and potassium.

Which are Apple growing areas in Kenya

There are several areas in Kenya where apple farming is being practised. The highlands of Mount Kenya are well-suited for apple farming, as the climate is cool and the soil is fertile. There are other regions where apples are being produced in high numbers like; Uasin Gishu, Transzoia,Nandi,Kericho etc Apple farmers in Kenya can make a good profit by using the proper cultivation methods and selling their produce at the right price. By carefully planning their farms and marketing their apples rightly, Kenyan apple farmers can make a good living from this valuable crop.

Apple propagation

You can propagate apples by planting seeds from an apple. The seeds will take about two weeks to germinate, and once they have, you will need to graft them before transplanting them in the farm. Grafting sometimes it's tedious and time consuming so my advise is to search and buy apple seedlings from established suppliers. Which are best apple varieties to plant? The most common and high yielding varieties to plant in Kenya are, Wambugu apple, top red, brae burn, and winter banana

Best Ecological Conditions for Apple Farming in Kenya

Before embarking on apple farming in Kenya, it is important to understand the ecological requirements for this special crop. Apples require well-drained, fertile soil with a pH of 6.0-7.0. The land should also be free of rocks and other debris, as these can damage the roots of the trees. The climate for apple farming should be cool and moist, with an annual rainfall of at least 1,000 mm. The temperature should not drop below -5 degrees Celsius or rise above 30 degrees Celsius.

Land preparation

Before you can start planting apple trees, you will need to prepare the land. This includes clearing the land of any debris, leveling the ground, and adding compost manure or fertilizer. If the land is not properly prepared, your apple trees will not thrive.

Planting

Planting apple trees is not very complicated. You will need to choose a sunny spot in your farm, and dig a hole that is twice as deep as the size of the pot your tree came in. Be sure to add plenty of manure or compost to the soil before planting. Your apple tree will need at least six hours of direct sunlight each day, so make sure to choose a location where it will have plenty of sun exposure. Once your tree is planted, be sure to water it regularly and provide nutrients. With a little bit of care, your apple tree will soon be bearing fruits.

Mulching

In order to make apple farming in Kenya profitable, mulching your plants is inevitable. Mulching is the process of covering the ground with a layer of organic material, such as leaves, straw, or compost. This protects the soil from erosion and helps to keep it moist. Mulching also helps to regulate the temperature of the soil, which is important for apple trees. It can help to keep the soil cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Mulching also helps to improve the fertility of the soil by adding organic matter.

Apple Irrigation

You can significantly increase your apple production by irrigating your plantation. Apple trees need a lot of water, especially during the hot summer months. If you can replenish them with enough water, they will produce a bumper crop of delicious apples. There are a number of different irrigation systems that you can use, though the best recommended method is drip irrigation. This is because drip irrigation helps to minimize water logging due moderate water supply to the plants.

Pruning

One of the most important things you can do to make apple farming in Kenya profitable is to properly prune your trees. Pruning helps the tree grow in a healthy and productive way, and it also helps to improve the quality of the fruit. Make sure to prune your trees regularly and be sure to remove any dead or damaged branches. You may also want to thin out branches so as to allow for free air circulation.

Apples nutritional requirements

Before planting crops it's always produce to perform soil testing to discern the nutrients that are available in the soil. After transplanting during the end of the first month, apples require plenty of nitrogen nutrients to promote faster growth of leaves and branches.

Pests and disease control

There are a number of pests and diseases that can affect apple farming in Kenya. These can be controlled through a combination of cultural practices, chemical treatments, and biological control measures. To keep your plantations healthy and profitable, it is important to implement a comprehensive pest and disease control program. This will help to minimize the damage caused by pests and diseases and ensure a healthy crop of apples.

Conclusion

There are a few key things to keep in mind if you want to make apple farming in Kenya profitable. First, you ought to select the right place. Second, you need to invest in quality seedlings and care for them appropriately. Third, you need to market your apples well. By following these tips, you can increase your chances of success and make a profit from apple farming in Kenya. Read the full article

[khalilhumam]

What does Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) look like across Oxfam?

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/what-does-womens-economic-empowerment-wee-look-like-across-oxfam/

What does Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) look like across Oxfam?

Shafeeka is the head of the women’s group in her village. Oxfam and partner Rural Women’s Development Association have helped set the group up with greenhouses and seeds and provided training on farming techniques Credit: Kieran Doherty/Oxfam

A Global Overview of 20 WEE Programmes and Projects in over 45 countries. We take a look at some of our WEE programmes below.

Jump to thematic area examples

Inclusive Markets and Value Chains

Enterprise Development and Financial Inclusion

Influencing Stakeholders

Dignified and decent work

Inclusive Markets and Value Chains

What is it? 

Inclusive market systems approaches focus on recognizing and redressing power imbalances between men and women, and between smallholder producers and large market actors. Value chains approaches focus on how increased knowledge, climate-resilience strategies and more equitable land rights enhance women’s collective power. 

Who does it?

GRAISEA –  Focus on responsible and inclusive business, women’s economic empowerment, and climate change resilience in Cambodia, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Enhancing Livelihoods Fund (ELF): Innovative funding mechanism working with Unilever’s value chains to improve outcomes for smallholders e.g. women ylang-ylang pickers, women farmers in cocoa, gherkin and cocoa coop’s in India, Comoros, Indonesia, Cote d’Ivoire and Kenya.

Her Veggie Basket– Oxfam India, Oxfam Germany, SEWA – Bihar: Promoting organic farming methods, training and formal government recognition of women vegetable farmers collective in India

Women Ambassadors of Agriculture– KEDV Turkey: Collective leadership training for seasonal migrant agricultural workers in the hazelnut supply chain. Focus on: improving living and working conditions and negotiating power

AgriMulheras – Mozambique: Strengthen women’s access to land, technical training and markets in horticulture, in partnership with rural women’s rights organizations and civil society organizations

HAKBIIT-Timor Leste: Increase women’s access to social, political and economic spheres through a disabilities-centred, hybrid approach. Focus on savings groups, gender norms, resilient livelihoods and income generation

Building Resilient Livelihoods – Afghanistan:  Women-led almond enterprises in Nili and Shahristan managing processing, packaging and market sales through marketing, management, leadership and book-keeping upskilling

Financial Inclusion and Enterprise Development 

Theresie Nyirantozi (60 yrs) admires tailored fabric she purchased in her home in Kirehe District, Eastern Rwanda. Since joining the Tuzamurane pineapple cooperative Theresie feels proud to no longer have to ask her husband for money to buy clothes and fabric.   Credit: Aurelie Marrier d’Unienville / Oxfam

What is it?  Leadership and economic opportunities through savings groups, SMEs and incubators. Focus on: women’s control over productive assets, increased income and social capital, and business support through partnerships. 

Who does it? 

The Enterprise Development Programme (EDP):  Pioneering, business approach providing mix of loans and technical support to enterprises focused on women’s leadership and enterprise development.  e.g fruit processing in Rwanda, organic cashews in Honduras, Handicrafts in Nepal

Agriprenneurs-OPTI: Develop young women’s start-up agriculture ideas in partnership with local university incubator. Projects include: sugar substitutes; gluten-free flours; Azolla (fern) production as local animal fodder

FINLIT Programme- Vietnam: Financial literacy and upskilling in household financial management through a partnership with VBSP Bank app, connecting women to good financial practices from other women entrepreneurs

IBV- Jordan : Incentive-Based Volunteering offers refugee women unable to work outside of refugee camps the opportunity to use existing skillsets while offering them cash-for-work opportunities, training and a modest source of income

Empower Youth for Work:  Socio-economic empowerment of youth in rural, climate affected areas. Focus on: co-creating opportunities for young women’s voices in enabling, youth-led environments in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh

Savings for Change: Savings groups boosting women’s financial independence and self-confidence. Focus on: member loans, profit sharing and network building in Mali, El Salvador, Timor-Leste, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala and Senegal

Influencing Stakeholders

Randy Duran (35 yrs) helps his wife Maria Socorro with the family laundry outside their home on Tubabao Island, Guiuan, Eastern Samar, Philippines. After Maria did an RCA (We Care Rapid Care Assessment) her and Randy started to share household chores. Credit: Aurelie Marrier d’Unienville / Oxfam

What is it? 

Influencing policy and partnering with local government, civil society organizations, international campaigns and private sector actors, to value women’s paid and unpaid work. Who does it? 

WE-CARE: Tackle women and girl’s heavy, uneven unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW)  through rapid care analyses, private sector partnerships, time- and labour-saving equipment, and influencing government to shift norms and policy on UCDW in Southern and Eastern Africa and in Asia

 Behind the Barcodes Campaign: Scores British, American, Dutch and German food retailers’ labour conditions in their supply chains. The public Supermarket Scorecard includes specific indicators on gender equality

Malawi Tea 2020 Project – Multi-stakeholder partnership of 22 organizations working to ensure living wages in Malawian tea sector, good nutrition and better leadership opportunities for women, alongside equal access to training e.g. through Farmer Field Schools and trade union

Dignified and Decent Work

What is it? Supporting rural and urban women workers – garment workers, domestic workers, home-based and gig economy workers. Focus on: re-valuing women’s work, building women’s collective power and fairer distribution of unpaid and paid care work.  Who does it?

Care for Carers Campaign- South Africa:  Partnering with the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union to ensure fair treatment, safe work conditions and reduced unpaid care work for women health care workers to enable a quality, universal healthcare system

Securing Rights Project-Bangladesh: Ensuring better work conditions for domestic workers, which includes use of digital platform with embedded two-way feedback system for domestic workers and the employers

Inclusive Economies- Mexico: Strengthen capacities of mostly rural women collectives and Indigenous groups in Puebla and Oaxaca ( e.g. coffee, cinnamon, agave, textiles, plant-based traditional products, eco-tourism)

Domestic Workers Rising Campaign – South Africa: Collective mobilization of domestic workers to influence government recognition of their precarious work.  Upskilling and bilateral learning to strengthen workers own voice in digital campaigning 

For the most up-to-date information on Oxfam’s WEE programmes, check out our related publications thread here and subscribe to the Women’s Economic Empowerment Knowledge Hub Newsletter. Note: This overview is a rolling document to represent of the diversity of Oxfam’s WEE work. It is updated quarterly to reflect project changes and is not a complete catalogue of all of Oxfam’s WEE projects.

Author

Aissa Boodhoo

Aissa is the Women’s Economic Empowerment Knowledge Hub Coordinator at Oxfam GB.

[twiganews]

Tomatoes farming kenya: 8 key steps to follow for success [UPDATED]

Farming tomatoes is one of the most profitable activities in kenya. This is because of the high demand of the same fruit. It's no surprise to find that almost every household in Kenya, a meal is incomplete without the taste of at least one tomato. The market for this horticultural produce is humongous and ever ready, which has lured so many people to invest in such a profitable venture. There has been huge number of farmers who have made a kill in tomato farming and at the same time however, there have been farmers who have lost millions in this activity. In this article am going to show you what you must do , to be successful in tomato farming.

1.  Land preparation

Before transplanting any tomato seedling you must ensure the farm well tilled and is free from any weed. Weeds are the best breeding space for huge number of pests and diseases. The second step is to make sure the soil is fine tuned and mixed with compost farm manure for rich nutrients addition. Note that , you should not plant your tomatoes in a farm where potatoes or pepper was grown. A farmer should wait 3 to 4 months before growing tomatoes. This method is done to avoid risks of transfering diseases from those plants to tomatoes.

2.   preparation of nursery bed

There are two ways you can use to raise your seedlings in the nursery bed; Raised seed bed Raised seed bed is the most common practice that has been used to raise seedlings for many years. Using seedling trays This is the modern and the most efficient way for raising your tomato seedlings. Benefits of seed trays - Seedling grow faster and strong - Thinning is not necessary since overcrowding is well managed - While transplanting, seedlings do not suffer from transplanting shock since their roots are completely intact with the soil. - Seeds raised in this method do not suffer from soil borne diseases - Less work is involved. As you can see the best method to raise your seedlings is well put out if you wish to be a successful tomato grower.

3.  Pruning and staking

Pruning should be done after about 2 weeks after transplanting. This helps the plant to acquire direct sunlight and also to provide good optimum air circulation.

4.  Pest control

I recommended natural and proven ways to control pests infestation from your farm instead of using costly chemicals which end up drying pockets of many farmers. However if need be, applying pesticides early enough is better than to wait when pests are already in the farm.

5.  Disease control

For the best practice to control most tomato diseases, it's advisable to water your plants in the early morning rather than in the evening so as to control soil borne diseases. Regular watering and application of rich calcium fertiliser is also recommended to control blossom end rot. To control tomato blight which is a major head ache to most farmers, you should enquire the right fungicide to use from agrovet who is near your locality.

6.  application of fertiliser

After transplanting phosphate fertiliser is added at the base of the plant for excellent root development . After 2 to 3 weeks Urea or CAN is applied for leaves development. At flowering stage NPK can be applied for huge uniform fruits production.

7.  Availability of water for irrigation

Availability of water is essential for good plant development. Without good source of water your tomato project is dead on arrival.

8. Choosing the right tomato variety

Finally, the key to success is choosing the best tomato varieties. You can read here the best tomato varieties which must be disease resistant and  high yields production Read the full article

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Socially Conscious Shopper’s Guide to Buying Coffee and Tea

Photo-illustration: Eater

Expand your collection with these online shops

A cup of coffee or tea might seem like such a simple ritual. But our daily cup (or two, or three) owes everything to our colonial, slave-built economy that relied on European and American trade with Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The legacy of exploitation in the coffee and tea industries still manifests today, depressing wages and earnings for workers and degrading natural ecosystems. One, though not the only, aspect of that legacy is trade. The fair trade movement that solidified in the late 1980s as a Fair Trade certification sought to tip the scales in favor of workers. More recently, the direct trade movement — which, as its name suggests, is built on direct exchanges between farmers and roasters — has emerged as an alternative to create still greater transparency and worker profit.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended our most trusted routines, down to how we’re buying and drinking our coffee. Maybe all of this has prompted you to rethink what goes into your daily cup, who made it possible, and who profits. Maybe you’re tired of parsing corporate statements like the one Starbucks produced earlier this month, after it initially prohibited employees from wearing Black Lives Matter shirts. Whether you’re in a rut with your morning brew and want to shake things up, you’re new to home-brewing and aren’t sure where to shop, or you want to support more BIPOC-owned and socially conscious businesses, let this list of 30 sources for buying coffee and tea online be a source of inspiration.

These purveyors source their product from around the world, and many are direct trade or are working to reimagine who owns tea and coffee culture. All of them offer online shopping, and some may offer contactless pick-ups. If you like the convenience of subscriptions, many offer those, too.

Whole Bean Coffee

Many coffee roasters source their beans from at least two global regions. If a specific region or country is the focus, that’s noted below.

BLK & Bold: You may have seen BLK & Bold at Whole Foods, but the brand’s selection of blends and single-origin coffees, as well as its teas, is also available directly online. Founded by Rod Johnson and Pernell Cezar, BLK & Bold donates 5 percent of its profits to organizations that benefit young people in Black communities in major cities across America.

Black Baza Coffee (India): This coffee roaster and grassroots organization works with growers in India to create a socially and environmentally sustainable model that supports biodiversity — a variety of species essential to healthy and resilient ecosystems. Arabica and robusta coffee beans, as well as chicory, are available from a number of partner coffee producers and microlots.

Boon Boona Coffee (East Africa): Boon Boona offers green coffee beans as well as roasted. The company’s founder, Efrem Fesaha, grew up with home-pan-roasted coffee, traditional in East African coffee ceremonies, and saw a demand in Seattle for unroasted beans. Boon Boona partners with farmers in East African countries, including Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.

Coffee Project NY: Besides selling whole bean house blends and single-origin coffees from around the world, Coffee Project NY champions education and certification through the Specialty Coffee Association. What Kaleena Teoh and Chi Sum Ngai started as a small cafe in the East Village has expanded to two other brick-and-mortar locations, including a flagship in Queens.

Driftaway Coffee: Anu Menon and Suyog Mody founded Driftaway with social and environmental sustainability in mind. The company, which roasts and ships from Brooklyn, develops long-term relationships with farms in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Rwanda and provides price transparency for all offerings.

Kahawa 1893 (Kenya): This brand, which shines a spotlight on Kenyan coffee from the Kisii region, gets its name from the year missionaries first planted coffee in Kenya. Margaret Nyamumbo, a third-generation coffee farmer, founded the company to reimagine the coffee supply chain and bring more profit to women farmers in Kenya.

Maru Coffee: Los Angeles-based Maru, started by Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim, sells whole beans in seasonal limited editions. It began as a tiny coffee shop that expanded into a larger location in LA’s Arts District, where it began roasting its own coffees from small batches of beans.

Nguyen Coffee Supply (Vietnam): Founded by Sahra Nguyen and billing itself as the “first ever Vietnamese-American-owned” coffee importer, all Nguyen arabica and robusta bean coffees are organically grown in Vietnam’s Central Highlands by a fourth-generation farmer known as Mr. Ton and roasted in Brooklyn. The brand currently offers three blends, Loyalty, Courage, and the high-caffeine Grit.

Not So Urban Coffee & Roastery: This small-batch micro roaster outside Atlanta roasts a selection of single-origin coffees to order. Its beans are ethically and sustainably sourced from growers around the world, with a current focus on East African countries.

Portrait Coffee: Another Atlanta-area roaster, Portrait is based in Southwest Atlanta. It offers a tailored selection of blends and single-origin beans. The company is committed to growing coffee careers in the Historic West End community while changing the face of specialty coffee “to include the black and brown folks who have been cropped out.”

Red Bay Coffee: Founded by the Oakland-based artist Keba Konte, Red Bay has a mission of community connection and grower empowerment. It sells a range of coffees online, including Carver’s Dream, a “bright, fruit-forward” blend of Guatemalan and Burundi coffees, and Coltrane, a medium-roast single origin from Colombia Cauca Piendamo with notes of black grape and dark chocolate.

Sweet Unity Farms Coffee (Tanzania): Started by David Robinson, the son of baseball titan Jackie Robinson, this farm belongs to a community of third-generation coffee farmers in Tanzania. The brand, which champions community investment and direct trade between farmers and roasters, sells 100 percent Arabica beans grown by family-owned cooperatives in Tanzania and Ethiopia and partners with family-owned roasters in California and New Jersey.

Tea

Just like coffee, tea is a fresh product that loses complexity and aroma over time, so for specialty teas, always note harvest date. Because a number of tea sellers sell “tea” in the colloquial sense — infusions of botanical ingredients — we use tea here to mean Camellia sinensis as well as yerba mate and herbal infusions. Sellers that specialize exclusively in Camellia sinensis from one region or country of origin are noted below.

Adjourn Teahouse: Founded by LaTonia Cokely and based in Washington, D.C., Adjourn specializes in aromatic hand-blended black teas with a wellness focus, incorporating botanicals like blue butterfly pea flowers, lemongrass, carrot, and ginger.

Brooklyn Tea: From their store in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Ali Wright and Jamila McGill offer a wide variety of teas, including green and white teas and tea blends, aged pu’ehr and oolong, mate, Rooibos, and other herbal tisanes. Brooklyn Tea partners with Tahuti Ma’at to provide compost to a community garden in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Calabash Tea & Tonic: Owned by a naturopath and fifth-generation herbalist, this D.C.-based company has an express wellness focus and offers herbal tonics alongside its flavored botanical blends.

Chai Walli (India): This Australian company, founded by an Indian Australian, works with organic and fair trade farms in India’s Assam Valley to source its tea. The range of small-batch spiced tea blends incorporates Ayurvedic knowledge from the founder’s own family. Ships to the United States.

Cuples Tea House: A tea store in Baltimore that ships nationwide, this is a one-stop shop for black and green tea blends, milk oolong, South African mate, and flavored teas, as well as herbal blends like chamomile, South African Rooibos, and hibiscus.

Eli Tea: Founded by 2017 Eater Young Gun Elias Majid, this tea shop in Birmingham, Michigan, offers an array of black, green, oolong, and white loose leaf teas, as well as chai blends and herbal teas with transparent sourcing.

Just Add Honey Tea Company: This Atlanta-based tea company carries a large selection of caffeinated teas and tea blends, from matcha to a high-caffeine mix of green tea, mate, and dried papaya. It also offers non-caffeinated herbal options, like chicory and cinnamon.

INI Sips: A family- and veteran-owned company based in New Britain, Connecticut, this shop sells 16 teas, including one ceremonial-grade matcha, and a small selection of direct trade coffees.

Kettl (Japan): Through its unique relationships with tea growers in Japan, Kettl has become the go-to for restaurants and Japanese tea lovers for the freshness and quality of its teas, which, because of supply chains, would not otherwise be available in the U.S. It has a small brick-and-mortar storefront in Manhattan but ships its shincha, matcha, genmaicha, rare Japanese oolong and black tea, and sobacha nationwide.

Kolkata Chai Co. (India): Through their New York shop, Ayan and Ani Sanyal — motivated by the appropriation of masala chai that they observed — aim to reclaim chai’s cultural roots. The company currently offers two DIY chai kits, a masala chai with Assam, green cardamom, cinnamon, black cardamom, black pepper, and cloves, and rose masala chai.

Matero (South America): With a mission to celebrate yerba mate culture, this online shop sells a wide selection of ethically and sustainably sourced mate from around South America. Loose leaf and tea bags are both available, as are calabaza (porongo) and bombillas.

Puehr Brooklyn (China): This Brooklyn-based teashop specializes in aged cake pu’ehr, as you might imagine, but its online shop also offers a variety of oolong, green, and white tea.

Raven & Hummingbird Tea Co. (Squamish Nation): A mother and daughter team, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss and Senaqwila Wyss, are behind this Coast Salish-owned tea company. Their small batch teas are sourced from plants in their Xwemeltchsn community garden in West Vancouver, through wild picking, and from local herbal distributors.

Red Lake Nation Foods (Red Lake Nation): A member of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Red Lake Nation Foods offers a selection of herbal teas and tea blends in addition to wild fruit jellies, jams and syrups, and Red Lake Nation–cultivated wild rice.

Serengeti Teas & Spices (Africa): This Harlem fixture isn’t just for herbal teas, although it carries a wide variety, including moringa, Moroccan mint teas, sorrel, South African Rooibos, and turmeric blends. It also specializes in premium and rare coffee, tea, and cocoa from countries around Africa.

Song Tea & Ceramics (China and Taiwan): With new selections of teas from China and Taiwan each year, Song Tea is an excellent source for fresh leaves, including green, white, oolong, red, and aged teas. It also offers botanical blends like sobacha, marshmallow, holy basil, and carrot. For those with the budget, Song also offers a small collection of rare aged teas.

Té Company (Taiwan): With a small tearoom in lower Manhattan and an impressive online shop, Té first got its start by partnering with fine dining restaurants. It specializes in high quality full leaf oolong tea from Taiwan that would otherwise not be available in the U.S. Besides oolong, it offers green, white, black, and herbal teas, including rare and vintage selections. Everything is sourced directly from tea producers.

Tea Drunk (China): Another tea oasis in lower Manhattan with a stocked online shop, Tea Drunk is unique in that it sources and imports directly from heritage tea growers in China. A (virtual) visit to Tea Drunk is an education in and celebration of terroir, season, and craft across green, yellow, white, Wu Long, red, and black teas, including pu’ehr.

Katie Okamoto is a Los Angeles–based writer and former editor at Metropolis, the New York–based design and architecture monthly. Find her work at katieokamoto.com and occasionally on Twitter and Instagram.

Photo credits: Hand: Prostock-Studio/GettyShelves: Arman Zhenikeyev/Getty

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3hU75iR https://ift.tt/2YoNXSo

Photo-illustration: Eater

Expand your collection with these online shops

A cup of coffee or tea might seem like such a simple ritual. But our daily cup (or two, or three) owes everything to our colonial, slave-built economy that relied on European and American trade with Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The legacy of exploitation in the coffee and tea industries still manifests today, depressing wages and earnings for workers and degrading natural ecosystems. One, though not the only, aspect of that legacy is trade. The fair trade movement that solidified in the late 1980s as a Fair Trade certification sought to tip the scales in favor of workers. More recently, the direct trade movement — which, as its name suggests, is built on direct exchanges between farmers and roasters — has emerged as an alternative to create still greater transparency and worker profit.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended our most trusted routines, down to how we’re buying and drinking our coffee. Maybe all of this has prompted you to rethink what goes into your daily cup, who made it possible, and who profits. Maybe you’re tired of parsing corporate statements like the one Starbucks produced earlier this month, after it initially prohibited employees from wearing Black Lives Matter shirts. Whether you’re in a rut with your morning brew and want to shake things up, you’re new to home-brewing and aren’t sure where to shop, or you want to support more BIPOC-owned and socially conscious businesses, let this list of 30 sources for buying coffee and tea online be a source of inspiration.

These purveyors source their product from around the world, and many are direct trade or are working to reimagine who owns tea and coffee culture. All of them offer online shopping, and some may offer contactless pick-ups. If you like the convenience of subscriptions, many offer those, too.

Whole Bean Coffee

Many coffee roasters source their beans from at least two global regions. If a specific region or country is the focus, that’s noted below.

BLK & Bold: You may have seen BLK & Bold at Whole Foods, but the brand’s selection of blends and single-origin coffees, as well as its teas, is also available directly online. Founded by Rod Johnson and Pernell Cezar, BLK & Bold donates 5 percent of its profits to organizations that benefit young people in Black communities in major cities across America.

Black Baza Coffee (India): This coffee roaster and grassroots organization works with growers in India to create a socially and environmentally sustainable model that supports biodiversity — a variety of species essential to healthy and resilient ecosystems. Arabica and robusta coffee beans, as well as chicory, are available from a number of partner coffee producers and microlots.

Boon Boona Coffee (East Africa): Boon Boona offers green coffee beans as well as roasted. The company’s founder, Efrem Fesaha, grew up with home-pan-roasted coffee, traditional in East African coffee ceremonies, and saw a demand in Seattle for unroasted beans. Boon Boona partners with farmers in East African countries, including Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.

Coffee Project NY: Besides selling whole bean house blends and single-origin coffees from around the world, Coffee Project NY champions education and certification through the Specialty Coffee Association. What Kaleena Teoh and Chi Sum Ngai started as a small cafe in the East Village has expanded to two other brick-and-mortar locations, including a flagship in Queens.

Driftaway Coffee: Anu Menon and Suyog Mody founded Driftaway with social and environmental sustainability in mind. The company, which roasts and ships from Brooklyn, develops long-term relationships with farms in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Rwanda and provides price transparency for all offerings.

Kahawa 1893 (Kenya): This brand, which shines a spotlight on Kenyan coffee from the Kisii region, gets its name from the year missionaries first planted coffee in Kenya. Margaret Nyamumbo, a third-generation coffee farmer, founded the company to reimagine the coffee supply chain and bring more profit to women farmers in Kenya.

Maru Coffee: Los Angeles-based Maru, started by Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim, sells whole beans in seasonal limited editions. It began as a tiny coffee shop that expanded into a larger location in LA’s Arts District, where it began roasting its own coffees from small batches of beans.

Nguyen Coffee Supply (Vietnam): Founded by Sahra Nguyen and billing itself as the “first ever Vietnamese-American-owned” coffee importer, all Nguyen arabica and robusta bean coffees are organically grown in Vietnam’s Central Highlands by a fourth-generation farmer known as Mr. Ton and roasted in Brooklyn. The brand currently offers three blends, Loyalty, Courage, and the high-caffeine Grit.

Not So Urban Coffee & Roastery: This small-batch micro roaster outside Atlanta roasts a selection of single-origin coffees to order. Its beans are ethically and sustainably sourced from growers around the world, with a current focus on East African countries.

Portrait Coffee: Another Atlanta-area roaster, Portrait is based in Southwest Atlanta. It offers a tailored selection of blends and single-origin beans. The company is committed to growing coffee careers in the Historic West End community while changing the face of specialty coffee “to include the black and brown folks who have been cropped out.”

Red Bay Coffee: Founded by the Oakland-based artist Keba Konte, Red Bay has a mission of community connection and grower empowerment. It sells a range of coffees online, including Carver’s Dream, a “bright, fruit-forward” blend of Guatemalan and Burundi coffees, and Coltrane, a medium-roast single origin from Colombia Cauca Piendamo with notes of black grape and dark chocolate.

Sweet Unity Farms Coffee (Tanzania): Started by David Robinson, the son of baseball titan Jackie Robinson, this farm belongs to a community of third-generation coffee farmers in Tanzania. The brand, which champions community investment and direct trade between farmers and roasters, sells 100 percent Arabica beans grown by family-owned cooperatives in Tanzania and Ethiopia and partners with family-owned roasters in California and New Jersey.

Tea

Just like coffee, tea is a fresh product that loses complexity and aroma over time, so for specialty teas, always note harvest date. Because a number of tea sellers sell “tea” in the colloquial sense — infusions of botanical ingredients — we use tea here to mean Camellia sinensis as well as yerba mate and herbal infusions. Sellers that specialize exclusively in Camellia sinensis from one region or country of origin are noted below.

Adjourn Teahouse: Founded by LaTonia Cokely and based in Washington, D.C., Adjourn specializes in aromatic hand-blended black teas with a wellness focus, incorporating botanicals like blue butterfly pea flowers, lemongrass, carrot, and ginger.

Brooklyn Tea: From their store in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Ali Wright and Jamila McGill offer a wide variety of teas, including green and white teas and tea blends, aged pu’ehr and oolong, mate, Rooibos, and other herbal tisanes. Brooklyn Tea partners with Tahuti Ma’at to provide compost to a community garden in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Calabash Tea & Tonic: Owned by a naturopath and fifth-generation herbalist, this D.C.-based company has an express wellness focus and offers herbal tonics alongside its flavored botanical blends.

Chai Walli (India): This Australian company, founded by an Indian Australian, works with organic and fair trade farms in India’s Assam Valley to source its tea. The range of small-batch spiced tea blends incorporates Ayurvedic knowledge from the founder’s own family. Ships to the United States.

Cuples Tea House: A tea store in Baltimore that ships nationwide, this is a one-stop shop for black and green tea blends, milk oolong, South African mate, and flavored teas, as well as herbal blends like chamomile, South African Rooibos, and hibiscus.

Eli Tea: Founded by 2017 Eater Young Gun Elias Majid, this tea shop in Birmingham, Michigan, offers an array of black, green, oolong, and white loose leaf teas, as well as chai blends and herbal teas with transparent sourcing.

Just Add Honey Tea Company: This Atlanta-based tea company carries a large selection of caffeinated teas and tea blends, from matcha to a high-caffeine mix of green tea, mate, and dried papaya. It also offers non-caffeinated herbal options, like chicory and cinnamon.

INI Sips: A family- and veteran-owned company based in New Britain, Connecticut, this shop sells 16 teas, including one ceremonial-grade matcha, and a small selection of direct trade coffees.

Kettl (Japan): Through its unique relationships with tea growers in Japan, Kettl has become the go-to for restaurants and Japanese tea lovers for the freshness and quality of its teas, which, because of supply chains, would not otherwise be available in the U.S. It has a small brick-and-mortar storefront in Manhattan but ships its shincha, matcha, genmaicha, rare Japanese oolong and black tea, and sobacha nationwide.

Kolkata Chai Co. (India): Through their New York shop, Ayan and Ani Sanyal — motivated by the appropriation of masala chai that they observed — aim to reclaim chai’s cultural roots. The company currently offers two DIY chai kits, a masala chai with Assam, green cardamom, cinnamon, black cardamom, black pepper, and cloves, and rose masala chai.

Matero (South America): With a mission to celebrate yerba mate culture, this online shop sells a wide selection of ethically and sustainably sourced mate from around South America. Loose leaf and tea bags are both available, as are calabaza (porongo) and bombillas.

Puehr Brooklyn (China): This Brooklyn-based teashop specializes in aged cake pu’ehr, as you might imagine, but its online shop also offers a variety of oolong, green, and white tea.

Raven & Hummingbird Tea Co. (Squamish Nation): A mother and daughter team, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss and Senaqwila Wyss, are behind this Coast Salish-owned tea company. Their small batch teas are sourced from plants in their Xwemeltchsn community garden in West Vancouver, through wild picking, and from local herbal distributors.

Red Lake Nation Foods (Red Lake Nation): A member of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Red Lake Nation Foods offers a selection of herbal teas and tea blends in addition to wild fruit jellies, jams and syrups, and Red Lake Nation–cultivated wild rice.

Serengeti Teas & Spices (Africa): This Harlem fixture isn’t just for herbal teas, although it carries a wide variety, including moringa, Moroccan mint teas, sorrel, South African Rooibos, and turmeric blends. It also specializes in premium and rare coffee, tea, and cocoa from countries around Africa.

Song Tea & Ceramics (China and Taiwan): With new selections of teas from China and Taiwan each year, Song Tea is an excellent source for fresh leaves, including green, white, oolong, red, and aged teas. It also offers botanical blends like sobacha, marshmallow, holy basil, and carrot. For those with the budget, Song also offers a small collection of rare aged teas.

Té Company (Taiwan): With a small tearoom in lower Manhattan and an impressive online shop, Té first got its start by partnering with fine dining restaurants. It specializes in high quality full leaf oolong tea from Taiwan that would otherwise not be available in the U.S. Besides oolong, it offers green, white, black, and herbal teas, including rare and vintage selections. Everything is sourced directly from tea producers.

Tea Drunk (China): Another tea oasis in lower Manhattan with a stocked online shop, Tea Drunk is unique in that it sources and imports directly from heritage tea growers in China. A (virtual) visit to Tea Drunk is an education in and celebration of terroir, season, and craft across green, yellow, white, Wu Long, red, and black teas, including pu’ehr.

Katie Okamoto is a Los Angeles–based writer and former editor at Metropolis, the New York–based design and architecture monthly. Find her work at katieokamoto.com and occasionally on Twitter and Instagram.

Photo credits: Hand: Prostock-Studio/GettyShelves: Arman Zhenikeyev/Getty

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3hU75iR via Blogger https://ift.tt/2NnSvlE

[wineanddinosaur]

What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee

Starmaya. Centroamericano. H1. These are names those serious about their coffee should get to know, as hybrid varieties may be the coffees of the future.

Despite the abundance of specialty beans available today — familiar coffees include Arabica from Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and beyond — experts agree the coffee landscape is fundamentally changing.

Climate change threatens an existential disruption to the coffee industry with a veritable list of end-times plagues: heat, drought, floods, pests, and disease. As existing coffee breeds struggle in the extreme weather, prices will rise while Arabica varieties wane.

Farmers are now shifting their techniques. Many are adopting hardier hybrids like those mentioned above. But without a monumental reduction in global carbon emissions, shifts in America’s coffee supply could be a few bad harvests from collapsing.

The Fragility of the Coffee Supply Chain

Coffee is an agricultural product that depends on a vast and complex network of players to bring flawless beans to retail shelves each week. While around 64 percent of Americans drink coffee each day, few recognize the fragility of its supply chain. Between 70 and 80 percent of global production depends on 25 million smallholder farmers working five acres or less in Africa and Latin America. For the last decade, these farmers have struggled to make ends meet, many surviving at the threshold of poverty.

Climate change experts warn that global temperatures will continue to rise this century, increasing between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the hottest months. However, it is the resultant weather swings that pose the greatest present-day problems for coffee producers — and consumers.

“Most places growing coffee are already experiencing tremendous variability,” Hanna Neuschwander, communications director, World Coffee Research, says. “And that’s what pushes a farmer out. It’s not the 0.1-degree gradual rise, it’s the peaks and troughs, and those are already here.”

The World Coffee Research organization (WCR) was founded in 2012 as a non-profit to study the future of the industry’s agricultural sector with climate change as the backdrop.

WCR views climate change as the single biggest threat to the long-term sustainability of coffee. Without a reduction in carbon emissions, research and development must focus on mitigation like planting climate-appropriate varieties. Much like the hybrids in the wine industry, coffee varieties are created to account for environmental realities.

As Neuschwander explains, “Modern breeding is like a design process. What features do I want this chair to have? A straight back, a comfortable seat? We ask the same questions about [coffee] varieties.”

The goal is for “designer” hybrids to weather environmental extremes.

How Wild Weather Hurts Small Farmers

Thirty-year industry veteran roaster George Howell of the eponymous company in Massachusetts likens climate change to a spinning top. “The unpredictability is creating turbulence,” he says. “Imagine the disruption caused by sudden heavy storms during the harvest season or dry spells during the rainy season.”

East Africa is historically prone to weather extremes but is otherwise thought optimal for coffee farming. However, droughts and floods have intensified. In late 2019 and early 2020, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia faced a surge in rainfall attributed to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) weather system. Like the Indian Ocean’s version of the Pacific’s El Niño, the IOD can lift ocean temperatures up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

Ethiopia’s coffee farmers rely on seasonal arid weather in November to dry their cherries on raised beds. With the early, prolonged rains of 2019 in Jimma, farmers scrambled to shield crops with tarps, risking moisture and mold and mistakes.

When rain falls unexpectedly or with ferocity, it disrupts the entire value chain, from picking, processing, logistics to quality control. Classic supply and demand dictates less and more expensive coffee for American drinkers while hurting farmers.

More Heat, More Problems

In Central America, humid and wet conditions have pushed a devastating fungus called leaf rust, or roya, deep into new regions from Colombia up to Mexico.

El Savador is a stark example: “In 2010-2011, the country produced 1.7 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee. During the 2013-2014 harvest, farmers only produced 499,000 bags,” Matthew Swenson, chief product officer, Chameleon Cold Brew Coffee in Texas, says. Leaf rust is believed to be the culprit for much of the 70 percent decrease in production.

In 2011, heavy wind and rain from Tropical Storm Agatha carried spores into Guatemala’s mountains, bringing with it an explosion of fungus. “I remember driving around and seeing farms without a single leaf or cherry due to rust in 2012,” Howell says, recalling a buying trip to the country. “It was all gone. Leaves had fallen to the ground. Those farmers who lost that crop had no safety net, no subsidies, nothing.”

Much like wine grapes, higher temperatures impact the coffee plant negatively by accelerating ripening, shifting harvest dates forward, and reducing photosynthesis, which compromises flavor development and quality. Because Arabica grows best in cooler conditions, quality degrades as the thermometer reading rises.

Changes in climate invite new diseases and pests to thrive — for example, the life cycle of the coffee borer beetle has become faster, increasing its populations. The beetles bore into the coffee cherry to lay eggs that hatch days later, destroying the fruit from the inside out.

Farms at lower elevations in Brazil are now grappling with rising temperatures, yet they have nowhere to go. “It’s unrealistic to think producers can afford new land or move up the mountain to a cooler location, especially when they’re already struggling,” says Gabriel Agrelli Moreira of Daterra Coffee, a sustainable coffee farm in Brazil.

While farmers could pivot from quality Arabica production to sturdier, high-volume Robusta, the suggestion is akin to Burgundy’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay growers switching to Gamay and Aligoté.

Hope for Hybrids

Much of the coffee industry’s hope lies at the feet of F1 hybrids. These varieties are stronger in the face of weather extremes and diseases. To save the industry, they must prove climate-change-proof and economically viable for the farmer while tasting delicious to consumers.

Though farmers and breeders have been taking advantage of hybrids (when two unique coffee varieties are bred together) for over 100 years, the use of first-generation (F1) hybrids, which tend to have significantly higher performance, is very new in coffee — they have only been planted commercially for less than 10 years.

The F1 generating excitement is Starmaya, a variety that can be shared among farmers in cheaper seed form. Australian roasting company Single O released a limited-edition Starmaya coffee to prove its consumer appeal, pitching it as “climate-resilient” and “future-friendly.”

Can Adaptive Farming, Soil Carbon Sequestration and Hybrids Save Coffee?

Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all panacea to mitigating climate change doesn’t exist. Every farmer must adjust their practices based on knowledge, resources, and stamina.

Raul Perez is a fourth-generation coffee farmer in Acatenango, Guatemala. The beans from his farm, La Soledad, frequently end up in the hands of America’s best roasters, from George Howell Coffee to Intelligentsia.

Perez uses adaptive farming techniques to combat heat and drought. Shade trees keep coffee plants cool. Eschewing herbicides helps grass preserve soil moisture and prevent erosion. Grafting Arabica to Robusta roots, using a common technique in wine, helps with drought- and heat-resistance. He’s also experimenting with hybrids with promising results.

Daterra launched Bioterra Academy, a research lab used to study soil health and “carbon farming” as a tool to fight climate change. A healthy soil retains water, prevents plant disease, cycles nutrients, fixes nitrogen, and can sequester carbon.

“About 25 percent of the planet’s soil has already been degraded,” Moreira says. The UN FAO calculates the world has only 60 years of harvests left, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) suggests half the world’s coffee-producing land will be unsuitable by 2050.

American Business Must Invest at the Source: Small Coffee Farmers

“Private enterprise needs to step up and lead the way. Businesses at the top of the supply chain have a moral and business continuity obligation to re-invest at origin because without those farmers, we don’t have a healthy long-term prospect for our businesses,” Swenson says.

Promising tools like farming strategies and hybrids are only as good as their reach. Most smallholder farmers can’t afford to renovate farms. Many live in remote areas without access to research. Country-specific coffee associations like ANACAFE in Guatemala and the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) in Colombia provide varying degrees of assistance, along with non-governmental organizations and private donors, but business must be integral to the solution.

In Guatemala, Chameleon Coffee is funding educational centers focused around 12-acre plots. On these experimental farms, producers can learn about the best varieties for their areas, methods of re-planting, proper plant spacing, and other techniques like pruning. Swenson says the effort is worth it because the company can demonstrate best practices without farmers risking their crops, while simultaneously building trust.

Saving coffee will take strategy and time, but forget the future. Climate change is here now, and its effects are rippling through the industry, soon to reach your very cup.

The article What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/climate-change-coffee-production/

[johnboothus]

What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee

Starmaya. Centroamericano. H1. These are names those serious about their coffee should get to know, as hybrid varieties may be the coffees of the future.

Despite the abundance of specialty beans available today — familiar coffees include Arabica from Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and beyond — experts agree the coffee landscape is fundamentally changing.

Climate change threatens an existential disruption to the coffee industry with a veritable list of end-times plagues: heat, drought, floods, pests, and disease. As existing coffee breeds struggle in the extreme weather, prices will rise while Arabica varieties wane.

Farmers are now shifting their techniques. Many are adopting hardier hybrids like those mentioned above. But without a monumental reduction in global carbon emissions, shifts in America’s coffee supply could be a few bad harvests from collapsing.

The Fragility of the Coffee Supply Chain

Coffee is an agricultural product that depends on a vast and complex network of players to bring flawless beans to retail shelves each week. While around 64 percent of Americans drink coffee each day, few recognize the fragility of its supply chain. Between 70 and 80 percent of global production depends on 25 million smallholder farmers working five acres or less in Africa and Latin America. For the last decade, these farmers have struggled to make ends meet, many surviving at the threshold of poverty.

Climate change experts warn that global temperatures will continue to rise this century, increasing between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the hottest months. However, it is the resultant weather swings that pose the greatest present-day problems for coffee producers — and consumers.

“Most places growing coffee are already experiencing tremendous variability,” Hanna Neuschwander, communications director, World Coffee Research, says. “And that’s what pushes a farmer out. It’s not the 0.1-degree gradual rise, it’s the peaks and troughs, and those are already here.”

The World Coffee Research organization (WCR) was founded in 2012 as a non-profit to study the future of the industry’s agricultural sector with climate change as the backdrop.

WCR views climate change as the single biggest threat to the long-term sustainability of coffee. Without a reduction in carbon emissions, research and development must focus on mitigation like planting climate-appropriate varieties. Much like the hybrids in the wine industry, coffee varieties are created to account for environmental realities.

As Neuschwander explains, “Modern breeding is like a design process. What features do I want this chair to have? A straight back, a comfortable seat? We ask the same questions about [coffee] varieties.”

The goal is for “designer” hybrids to weather environmental extremes.

How Wild Weather Hurts Small Farmers

Thirty-year industry veteran roaster George Howell of the eponymous company in Massachusetts likens climate change to a spinning top. “The unpredictability is creating turbulence,” he says. “Imagine the disruption caused by sudden heavy storms during the harvest season or dry spells during the rainy season.”

East Africa is historically prone to weather extremes but is otherwise thought optimal for coffee farming. However, droughts and floods have intensified. In late 2019 and early 2020, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia faced a surge in rainfall attributed to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) weather system. Like the Indian Ocean’s version of the Pacific’s El Niño, the IOD can lift ocean temperatures up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

Ethiopia’s coffee farmers rely on seasonal arid weather in November to dry their cherries on raised beds. With the early, prolonged rains of 2019 in Jimma, farmers scrambled to shield crops with tarps, risking moisture and mold and mistakes.

When rain falls unexpectedly or with ferocity, it disrupts the entire value chain, from picking, processing, logistics to quality control. Classic supply and demand dictates less and more expensive coffee for American drinkers while hurting farmers.

More Heat, More Problems

In Central America, humid and wet conditions have pushed a devastating fungus called leaf rust, or roya, deep into new regions from Colombia up to Mexico.

El Savador is a stark example: “In 2010-2011, the country produced 1.7 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee. During the 2013-2014 harvest, farmers only produced 499,000 bags,” Matthew Swenson, chief product officer, Chameleon Cold Brew Coffee in Texas, says. Leaf rust is believed to be the culprit for much of the 70 percent decrease in production.

In 2011, heavy wind and rain from Tropical Storm Agatha carried spores into Guatemala’s mountains, bringing with it an explosion of fungus. “I remember driving around and seeing farms without a single leaf or cherry due to rust in 2012,” Howell says, recalling a buying trip to the country. “It was all gone. Leaves had fallen to the ground. Those farmers who lost that crop had no safety net, no subsidies, nothing.”

Much like wine grapes, higher temperatures impact the coffee plant negatively by accelerating ripening, shifting harvest dates forward, and reducing photosynthesis, which compromises flavor development and quality. Because Arabica grows best in cooler conditions, quality degrades as the thermometer reading rises.

Changes in climate invite new diseases and pests to thrive — for example, the life cycle of the coffee borer beetle has become faster, increasing its populations. The beetles bore into the coffee cherry to lay eggs that hatch days later, destroying the fruit from the inside out.

Farms at lower elevations in Brazil are now grappling with rising temperatures, yet they have nowhere to go. “It’s unrealistic to think producers can afford new land or move up the mountain to a cooler location, especially when they’re already struggling,” says Gabriel Agrelli Moreira of Daterra Coffee, a sustainable coffee farm in Brazil.

While farmers could pivot from quality Arabica production to sturdier, high-volume Robusta, the suggestion is akin to Burgundy’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay growers switching to Gamay and Aligoté.

Hope for Hybrids

Much of the coffee industry’s hope lies at the feet of F1 hybrids. These varieties are stronger in the face of weather extremes and diseases. To save the industry, they must prove climate-change-proof and economically viable for the farmer while tasting delicious to consumers.

Though farmers and breeders have been taking advantage of hybrids (when two unique coffee varieties are bred together) for over 100 years, the use of first-generation (F1) hybrids, which tend to have significantly higher performance, is very new in coffee — they have only been planted commercially for less than 10 years.

The F1 generating excitement is Starmaya, a variety that can be shared among farmers in cheaper seed form. Australian roasting company Single O released a limited-edition Starmaya coffee to prove its consumer appeal, pitching it as “climate-resilient” and “future-friendly.”

Can Adaptive Farming, Soil Carbon Sequestration and Hybrids Save Coffee?

Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all panacea to mitigating climate change doesn’t exist. Every farmer must adjust their practices based on knowledge, resources, and stamina.

Raul Perez is a fourth-generation coffee farmer in Acatenango, Guatemala. The beans from his farm, La Soledad, frequently end up in the hands of America’s best roasters, from George Howell Coffee to Intelligentsia.

Perez uses adaptive farming techniques to combat heat and drought. Shade trees keep coffee plants cool. Eschewing herbicides helps grass preserve soil moisture and prevent erosion. Grafting Arabica to Robusta roots, using a common technique in wine, helps with drought- and heat-resistance. He’s also experimenting with hybrids with promising results.

Daterra launched Bioterra Academy, a research lab used to study soil health and “carbon farming” as a tool to fight climate change. A healthy soil retains water, prevents plant disease, cycles nutrients, fixes nitrogen, and can sequester carbon.

“About 25 percent of the planet’s soil has already been degraded,” Moreira says. The UN FAO calculates the world has only 60 years of harvests left, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) suggests half the world’s coffee-producing land will be unsuitable by 2050.

American Business Must Invest at the Source: Small Coffee Farmers

“Private enterprise needs to step up and lead the way. Businesses at the top of the supply chain have a moral and business continuity obligation to re-invest at origin because without those farmers, we don’t have a healthy long-term prospect for our businesses,” Swenson says.

Promising tools like farming strategies and hybrids are only as good as their reach. Most smallholder farmers can’t afford to renovate farms. Many live in remote areas without access to research. Country-specific coffee associations like ANACAFE in Guatemala and the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) in Colombia provide varying degrees of assistance, along with non-governmental organizations and private donors, but business must be integral to the solution.

In Guatemala, Chameleon Coffee is funding educational centers focused around 12-acre plots. On these experimental farms, producers can learn about the best varieties for their areas, methods of re-planting, proper plant spacing, and other techniques like pruning. Swenson says the effort is worth it because the company can demonstrate best practices without farmers risking their crops, while simultaneously building trust.

Saving coffee will take strategy and time, but forget the future. Climate change is here now, and its effects are rippling through the industry, soon to reach your very cup.

The article What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/climate-change-coffee-production/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/what-climate-change-means-for-the-future-of-coffee

[ericfruits]

In Rwanda, farming competently is not enough

BY AFRICAN STANDARDS, Rwanda is an agricultural success story. Yields of bananas, beans, cassava and maize—the four main crops by land area—have all risen substantially since the turn of the century. Over the five years to 2017, the country’s maize fields were more productive than those in neighbouring Burundi, Kenya or Tanzania, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, an arm of the UN.

A third of Rwanda’s small maize farmers and more than two-thirds of small rice farmers plant improved hybrid seeds in the main growing season, which begins in September. Fertiliser imports are rising; in Western province, an agricultural hub, most farmers use it. Smallholders get sound advice from an army of government-trained “farmer promoters” and from One Acre Fund, a large charity. If you believe the government’s figures, extreme poverty is falling. Even if you do not, more houses have metal roofs and cement floors.

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But talk to Marie, who grows beans and maize on steeply sloping land in the village of Ryaruhanga, and it becomes clear that this is not nearly enough. Although Marie has planted improved seeds and used some fertiliser, her crops have fared poorly. Some seeds rotted in the ground, while others grew slowly because of a lack of rain at a critical time. Necessity has driven her to work as an agricultural labourer, for which she receives a mere 800 Rwandan francs ($0.88) a day. She is struggling to keep her children in primary school.

Even competent farmers like Marie live close to the edge—a single bad harvest can drive them into destitution. That is partly because their farms are tiny. Rwanda is more densely populated than the Netherlands, with 490 people to each square kilometre. In contrast to the Netherlands, almost everyone is a farmer. Rural population growth means that land holdings are shrinking. A government survey in 2011 found that 52% of farms in Western province were smaller than 0.3 hectares. Six years later the proportion had reached 63%.

What are smallholder farmers to do? They could up sticks and move to a city. But that may not change their fortunes much. Researchers have found that African cities are less productive than Asian or Latin American ones, perhaps because they lack large industrial employers. A paper by Patricia Jones of Oxford University and others detected a significant wage premium in the biggest cities of Nigeria and Tanzania, but not in other cities in those countries. Only men received the premium.

A smallholder can try to improve the soil. Like much of western Rwanda, Marie’s land is highly acidic. She has tried adding lime, which helped a little. But lime is expensive and heavy, and pays for itself only slowly. Nor can Marie add much organic matter to the soil, which would help it retain water. In the past she cut grass for a compost heap. Now her neighbours compete for the same tufts.

The Rwandan government’s policy is to encourage smallholders to grow more valuable crops. It is promoting fruit trees, which can be highly profitable, if slow to mature. One Acre Fund distributed 6m tree seedlings last year. Many were grevilleas, which grow fast and straight and can be used to make furniture or plant supports. Bean farmers can often boost productivity simply by growing the plants up taller poles, says Eric Pohlman of One Acre Fund.

Not all farmers struggle. A few miles from Marie, Innocent Niyongira grows maize, beans, soya and tomatoes so successfully that he has taken on two workers. He has experimented with plant spacing, finding that sowing maize seeds farther apart produces bigger, more marketable cobs. Having acquired more land, he is thinking of getting into macadamia nuts. How did a man with only five years of schooling become such an excellent farmer? Innocent says that he has been influenced by inspirational stories on the radio, and that he works all the time. Some people are simply better at farming than others. The problem is that poor people in rural areas have almost no alternative.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "After subsistence, what?"

https://econ.st/2w0iNSe

[isaiahrippinus]

What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee

Starmaya. Centroamericano. H1. These are names those serious about their coffee should get to know, as hybrid varieties may be the coffees of the future.

Despite the abundance of specialty beans available today — familiar coffees include Arabica from Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and beyond — experts agree the coffee landscape is fundamentally changing.

Climate change threatens an existential disruption to the coffee industry with a veritable list of end-times plagues: heat, drought, floods, pests, and disease. As existing coffee breeds struggle in the extreme weather, prices will rise while Arabica varieties wane.

Farmers are now shifting their techniques. Many are adopting hardier hybrids like those mentioned above. But without a monumental reduction in global carbon emissions, shifts in America’s coffee supply could be a few bad harvests from collapsing.

The Fragility of the Coffee Supply Chain

Coffee is an agricultural product that depends on a vast and complex network of players to bring flawless beans to retail shelves each week. While around 64 percent of Americans drink coffee each day, few recognize the fragility of its supply chain. Between 70 and 80 percent of global production depends on 25 million smallholder farmers working five acres or less in Africa and Latin America. For the last decade, these farmers have struggled to make ends meet, many surviving at the threshold of poverty.

Climate change experts warn that global temperatures will continue to rise this century, increasing between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the hottest months. However, it is the resultant weather swings that pose the greatest present-day problems for coffee producers — and consumers.

“Most places growing coffee are already experiencing tremendous variability,” Hanna Neuschwander, communications director, World Coffee Research, says. “And that’s what pushes a farmer out. It’s not the 0.1-degree gradual rise, it’s the peaks and troughs, and those are already here.”

The World Coffee Research organization (WCR) was founded in 2012 as a non-profit to study the future of the industry’s agricultural sector with climate change as the backdrop.

WCR views climate change as the single biggest threat to the long-term sustainability of coffee. Without a reduction in carbon emissions, research and development must focus on mitigation like planting climate-appropriate varieties. Much like the hybrids in the wine industry, coffee varieties are created to account for environmental realities.

As Neuschwander explains, “Modern breeding is like a design process. What features do I want this chair to have? A straight back, a comfortable seat? We ask the same questions about [coffee] varieties.”

The goal is for “designer” hybrids to weather environmental extremes.

How Wild Weather Hurts Small Farmers

Thirty-year industry veteran roaster George Howell of the eponymous company in Massachusetts likens climate change to a spinning top. “The unpredictability is creating turbulence,” he says. “Imagine the disruption caused by sudden heavy storms during the harvest season or dry spells during the rainy season.”

East Africa is historically prone to weather extremes but is otherwise thought optimal for coffee farming. However, droughts and floods have intensified. In late 2019 and early 2020, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia faced a surge in rainfall attributed to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) weather system. Like the Indian Ocean’s version of the Pacific’s El Niño, the IOD can lift ocean temperatures up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

Ethiopia’s coffee farmers rely on seasonal arid weather in November to dry their cherries on raised beds. With the early, prolonged rains of 2019 in Jimma, farmers scrambled to shield crops with tarps, risking moisture and mold and mistakes.

When rain falls unexpectedly or with ferocity, it disrupts the entire value chain, from picking, processing, logistics to quality control. Classic supply and demand dictates less and more expensive coffee for American drinkers while hurting farmers.

More Heat, More Problems

In Central America, humid and wet conditions have pushed a devastating fungus called leaf rust, or roya, deep into new regions from Colombia up to Mexico.

El Savador is a stark example: “In 2010-2011, the country produced 1.7 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee. During the 2013-2014 harvest, farmers only produced 499,000 bags,” Matthew Swenson, chief product officer, Chameleon Cold Brew Coffee in Texas, says. Leaf rust is believed to be the culprit for much of the 70 percent decrease in production.

In 2011, heavy wind and rain from Tropical Storm Agatha carried spores into Guatemala’s mountains, bringing with it an explosion of fungus. “I remember driving around and seeing farms without a single leaf or cherry due to rust in 2012,” Howell says, recalling a buying trip to the country. “It was all gone. Leaves had fallen to the ground. Those farmers who lost that crop had no safety net, no subsidies, nothing.”

Much like wine grapes, higher temperatures impact the coffee plant negatively by accelerating ripening, shifting harvest dates forward, and reducing photosynthesis, which compromises flavor development and quality. Because Arabica grows best in cooler conditions, quality degrades as the thermometer reading rises.

Changes in climate invite new diseases and pests to thrive — for example, the life cycle of the coffee borer beetle has become faster, increasing its populations. The beetles bore into the coffee cherry to lay eggs that hatch days later, destroying the fruit from the inside out.

Farms at lower elevations in Brazil are now grappling with rising temperatures, yet they have nowhere to go. “It’s unrealistic to think producers can afford new land or move up the mountain to a cooler location, especially when they’re already struggling,” says Gabriel Agrelli Moreira of Daterra Coffee, a sustainable coffee farm in Brazil.

While farmers could pivot from quality Arabica production to sturdier, high-volume Robusta, the suggestion is akin to Burgundy’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay growers switching to Gamay and Aligoté.

Hope for Hybrids

Much of the coffee industry’s hope lies at the feet of F1 hybrids. These varieties are stronger in the face of weather extremes and diseases. To save the industry, they must prove climate-change-proof and economically viable for the farmer while tasting delicious to consumers.

Though farmers and breeders have been taking advantage of hybrids (when two unique coffee varieties are bred together) for over 100 years, the use of first-generation (F1) hybrids, which tend to have significantly higher performance, is very new in coffee — they have only been planted commercially for less than 10 years.

The F1 generating excitement is Starmaya, a variety that can be shared among farmers in cheaper seed form. Australian roasting company Single O released a limited-edition Starmaya coffee to prove its consumer appeal, pitching it as “climate-resilient” and “future-friendly.”

Can Adaptive Farming, Soil Carbon Sequestration and Hybrids Save Coffee?

Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all panacea to mitigating climate change doesn’t exist. Every farmer must adjust their practices based on knowledge, resources, and stamina.

Raul Perez is a fourth-generation coffee farmer in Acatenango, Guatemala. The beans from his farm, La Soledad, frequently end up in the hands of America’s best roasters, from George Howell Coffee to Intelligentsia.

Perez uses adaptive farming techniques to combat heat and drought. Shade trees keep coffee plants cool. Eschewing herbicides helps grass preserve soil moisture and prevent erosion. Grafting Arabica to Robusta roots, using a common technique in wine, helps with drought- and heat-resistance. He’s also experimenting with hybrids with promising results.

Daterra launched Bioterra Academy, a research lab used to study soil health and “carbon farming” as a tool to fight climate change. A healthy soil retains water, prevents plant disease, cycles nutrients, fixes nitrogen, and can sequester carbon.

“About 25 percent of the planet’s soil has already been degraded,” Moreira says. The UN FAO calculates the world has only 60 years of harvests left, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) suggests half the world’s coffee-producing land will be unsuitable by 2050.

American Business Must Invest at the Source: Small Coffee Farmers

“Private enterprise needs to step up and lead the way. Businesses at the top of the supply chain have a moral and business continuity obligation to re-invest at origin because without those farmers, we don’t have a healthy long-term prospect for our businesses,” Swenson says.

Promising tools like farming strategies and hybrids are only as good as their reach. Most smallholder farmers can’t afford to renovate farms. Many live in remote areas without access to research. Country-specific coffee associations like ANACAFE in Guatemala and the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) in Colombia provide varying degrees of assistance, along with non-governmental organizations and private donors, but business must be integral to the solution.

In Guatemala, Chameleon Coffee is funding educational centers focused around 12-acre plots. On these experimental farms, producers can learn about the best varieties for their areas, methods of re-planting, proper plant spacing, and other techniques like pruning. Swenson says the effort is worth it because the company can demonstrate best practices without farmers risking their crops, while simultaneously building trust.

Saving coffee will take strategy and time, but forget the future. Climate change is here now, and its effects are rippling through the industry, soon to reach your very cup.

The article What Climate Change Means for the Future of Coffee appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/climate-change-coffee-production/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/616560831788990464

[eabc1234-blog]

Top Investment Opportunities in Tanzania 2020

Tanzania is a thriving hub of East African markets and its rapidly joining the ranks of its neighbors, such as Kenya, in revitalizing its economy.  This growth has resulted in a rush as many investment opportunities emerge in the country. If you are looking for an investment opening in Tanzania, the following are some of the opportunities you can exploit;

Logistics and Warehousing

Tanzania lags behind in its road, railway, and airway infrastructure. However, the government has been working to uplift this situation with increased investments in the sector. This is done by engaging international companies to create state of the art road networks which are strategically linked to railways lines. The networks support both the sea and dry ports. Through company registration in Tanzania you can provide legal logistics and warehousing in the country. Transportation of cargo in Tanzania is lucrative due to the active port and the need to supply landlocked countries such as Uganda and Rwanda.  An investment in the coordination of logistics and warehousing is a promising venture in Tanzania in 2020.

Agribusiness

Another good investment is agribusiness in Tanzania. The country has thriving agriculture that is split between food crops and cash crops. However, marketing these crops has been a challenge for many farmers. Therefore, closing this barrier is an opportunity that can be exploited successfully. The market for many products in Tanzania is available locally, where it is sold in urban areas. You can also supply the international market through exports, which are well regulated in Tanzania.  Lucrative opportunities exist in chicken, dairy and beef cattle, cashew nuts, cloves, coffee, and fruits.

Rental Services

Tanzania thrives with a very communal culture that is still reliving the famous ujamaa or socialist system. Remnants of this culture are seen in the close association of people in ceremonies, music concerts, religious and political gatherings, and even sports. This can be exploited by setting up rental services focused on events management and facilities supplies. These include public address systems, events, tents and chairs, MCs, among others. Company registration in Tanzania provides you with a license to organize for events which will allow access to the thriving market.

Tourism and Travel

Tanzania is a tourism hub in East Africa, especially supplied by unique attractions. You can provide traveling services for tourists to these centers and reap the associated services such as accommodation, promotion, and booking services. The tourism sites include the Serengeti National Park, Mt Kilimanjaro, and the Ngorongoro Conservatory, among others. Tourism is well established in the country, thus presenting numerous niches that you can invest in 2020. Meeting the needs of tourists, both local and international is a viable investment in Tanzania that can be easily tapped by providing quality travel, accommodation, and reliable booking services in the country.

Clean Water Services

Another lucrative investment in Tanzania is providing clean drinking water in the country's residential areas. Tanzania is grappling with the lack of clean drinking water, which means that its growing urban population is undersupplied. The drainage systems in the country have rendered many sources unhygienic due to contamination. Therefore, if you organize on how water can be economically ferried from clean sources, purified and supplied to residents, you are in for a profit. Water is a basic need that is consumed in huge amounts daily. The residents pay for transport, purification, and storage, which can be done economically in huge amounts. As the governments close in on the purification of public supplies, 2020 may be just your year in providing clean water in Tanzania.

Food Processing

The thriving agricultural industry is complemented by food processing. In Tanzania, processed food is taking hold in urban centers due to costs and storage. Many people do not shy away from mildly processed food hence creating a lucrative market. Processing food makes it easy to break bulk, package, and price. Your customers will mostly be retail and wholesale business and sometimes individual customers if you open a retail center. This opportunity allows you to reap high margins from buying raw food from the farms and transforming it into the consumer market. Most farmers lack the technical know-how or capital to dub in processing. Many businesses will gladly outsource this service to focus on their core business.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Photo-illustration: Eater Expand your collection with these online shops A cup of coffee or tea might seem like such a simple ritual. But our daily cup (or two, or three) owes everything to our colonial, slave-built economy that relied on European and American trade with Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The legacy of exploitation in the coffee and tea industries still manifests today, depressing wages and earnings for workers and degrading natural ecosystems. One, though not the only, aspect of that legacy is trade. The fair trade movement that solidified in the late 1980s as a Fair Trade certification sought to tip the scales in favor of workers. More recently, the direct trade movement — which, as its name suggests, is built on direct exchanges between farmers and roasters — has emerged as an alternative to create still greater transparency and worker profit. The coronavirus pandemic has upended our most trusted routines, down to how we’re buying and drinking our coffee. Maybe all of this has prompted you to rethink what goes into your daily cup, who made it possible, and who profits. Maybe you’re tired of parsing corporate statements like the one Starbucks produced earlier this month, after it initially prohibited employees from wearing Black Lives Matter shirts. Whether you’re in a rut with your morning brew and want to shake things up, you’re new to home-brewing and aren’t sure where to shop, or you want to support more BIPOC-owned and socially conscious businesses, let this list of 30 sources for buying coffee and tea online be a source of inspiration. These purveyors source their product from around the world, and many are direct trade or are working to reimagine who owns tea and coffee culture. All of them offer online shopping, and some may offer contactless pick-ups. If you like the convenience of subscriptions, many offer those, too. Whole Bean Coffee Many coffee roasters source their beans from at least two global regions. If a specific region or country is the focus, that’s noted below. BLK & Bold: You may have seen BLK & Bold at Whole Foods, but the brand’s selection of blends and single-origin coffees, as well as its teas, is also available directly online. Founded by Rod Johnson and Pernell Cezar, BLK & Bold donates 5 percent of its profits to organizations that benefit young people in Black communities in major cities across America. Black Baza Coffee (India): This coffee roaster and grassroots organization works with growers in India to create a socially and environmentally sustainable model that supports biodiversity — a variety of species essential to healthy and resilient ecosystems. Arabica and robusta coffee beans, as well as chicory, are available from a number of partner coffee producers and microlots. Boon Boona Coffee (East Africa): Boon Boona offers green coffee beans as well as roasted. The company’s founder, Efrem Fesaha, grew up with home-pan-roasted coffee, traditional in East African coffee ceremonies, and saw a demand in Seattle for unroasted beans. Boon Boona partners with farmers in East African countries, including Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. Coffee Project NY: Besides selling whole bean house blends and single-origin coffees from around the world, Coffee Project NY champions education and certification through the Specialty Coffee Association. What Kaleena Teoh and Chi Sum Ngai started as a small cafe in the East Village has expanded to two other brick-and-mortar locations, including a flagship in Queens. Driftaway Coffee: Anu Menon and Suyog Mody founded Driftaway with social and environmental sustainability in mind. The company, which roasts and ships from Brooklyn, develops long-term relationships with farms in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Rwanda and provides price transparency for all offerings. Kahawa 1893 (Kenya): This brand, which shines a spotlight on Kenyan coffee from the Kisii region, gets its name from the year missionaries first planted coffee in Kenya. Margaret Nyamumbo, a third-generation coffee farmer, founded the company to reimagine the coffee supply chain and bring more profit to women farmers in Kenya. Maru Coffee: Los Angeles-based Maru, started by Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim, sells whole beans in seasonal limited editions. It began as a tiny coffee shop that expanded into a larger location in LA’s Arts District, where it began roasting its own coffees from small batches of beans. Nguyen Coffee Supply (Vietnam): Founded by Sahra Nguyen and billing itself as the “first ever Vietnamese-American-owned” coffee importer, all Nguyen arabica and robusta bean coffees are organically grown in Vietnam’s Central Highlands by a fourth-generation farmer known as Mr. Ton and roasted in Brooklyn. The brand currently offers three blends, Loyalty, Courage, and the high-caffeine Grit. Not So Urban Coffee & Roastery: This small-batch micro roaster outside Atlanta roasts a selection of single-origin coffees to order. Its beans are ethically and sustainably sourced from growers around the world, with a current focus on East African countries. Portrait Coffee: Another Atlanta-area roaster, Portrait is based in Southwest Atlanta. It offers a tailored selection of blends and single-origin beans. The company is committed to growing coffee careers in the Historic West End community while changing the face of specialty coffee “to include the black and brown folks who have been cropped out.” Red Bay Coffee: Founded by the Oakland-based artist Keba Konte, Red Bay has a mission of community connection and grower empowerment. It sells a range of coffees online, including Carver’s Dream, a “bright, fruit-forward” blend of Guatemalan and Burundi coffees, and Coltrane, a medium-roast single origin from Colombia Cauca Piendamo with notes of black grape and dark chocolate. Sweet Unity Farms Coffee (Tanzania): Started by David Robinson, the son of baseball titan Jackie Robinson, this farm belongs to a community of third-generation coffee farmers in Tanzania. The brand, which champions community investment and direct trade between farmers and roasters, sells 100 percent Arabica beans grown by family-owned cooperatives in Tanzania and Ethiopia and partners with family-owned roasters in California and New Jersey. Tea Just like coffee, tea is a fresh product that loses complexity and aroma over time, so for specialty teas, always note harvest date. Because a number of tea sellers sell “tea” in the colloquial sense — infusions of botanical ingredients — we use tea here to mean Camellia sinensis as well as yerba mate and herbal infusions. Sellers that specialize exclusively in Camellia sinensis from one region or country of origin are noted below. Adjourn Teahouse: Founded by LaTonia Cokely and based in Washington, D.C., Adjourn specializes in aromatic hand-blended black teas with a wellness focus, incorporating botanicals like blue butterfly pea flowers, lemongrass, carrot, and ginger. Brooklyn Tea: From their store in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Ali Wright and Jamila McGill offer a wide variety of teas, including green and white teas and tea blends, aged pu’ehr and oolong, mate, Rooibos, and other herbal tisanes. Brooklyn Tea partners with Tahuti Ma’at to provide compost to a community garden in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Calabash Tea & Tonic: Owned by a naturopath and fifth-generation herbalist, this D.C.-based company has an express wellness focus and offers herbal tonics alongside its flavored botanical blends. Chai Walli (India): This Australian company, founded by an Indian Australian, works with organic and fair trade farms in India’s Assam Valley to source its tea. The range of small-batch spiced tea blends incorporates Ayurvedic knowledge from the founder’s own family. Ships to the United States. Cuples Tea House: A tea store in Baltimore that ships nationwide, this is a one-stop shop for black and green tea blends, milk oolong, South African mate, and flavored teas, as well as herbal blends like chamomile, South African Rooibos, and hibiscus. Eli Tea: Founded by 2017 Eater Young Gun Elias Majid, this tea shop in Birmingham, Michigan, offers an array of black, green, oolong, and white loose leaf teas, as well as chai blends and herbal teas with transparent sourcing. Just Add Honey Tea Company: This Atlanta-based tea company carries a large selection of caffeinated teas and tea blends, from matcha to a high-caffeine mix of green tea, mate, and dried papaya. It also offers non-caffeinated herbal options, like chicory and cinnamon. INI Sips: A family- and veteran-owned company based in New Britain, Connecticut, this shop sells 16 teas, including one ceremonial-grade matcha, and a small selection of direct trade coffees. Kettl (Japan): Through its unique relationships with tea growers in Japan, Kettl has become the go-to for restaurants and Japanese tea lovers for the freshness and quality of its teas, which, because of supply chains, would not otherwise be available in the U.S. It has a small brick-and-mortar storefront in Manhattan but ships its shincha, matcha, genmaicha, rare Japanese oolong and black tea, and sobacha nationwide. Kolkata Chai Co. (India): Through their New York shop, Ayan and Ani Sanyal — motivated by the appropriation of masala chai that they observed — aim to reclaim chai’s cultural roots. The company currently offers two DIY chai kits, a masala chai with Assam, green cardamom, cinnamon, black cardamom, black pepper, and cloves, and rose masala chai. Matero (South America): With a mission to celebrate yerba mate culture, this online shop sells a wide selection of ethically and sustainably sourced mate from around South America. Loose leaf and tea bags are both available, as are calabaza (porongo) and bombillas. Puehr Brooklyn (China): This Brooklyn-based teashop specializes in aged cake pu’ehr, as you might imagine, but its online shop also offers a variety of oolong, green, and white tea. Raven & Hummingbird Tea Co. (Squamish Nation): A mother and daughter team, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss and Senaqwila Wyss, are behind this Coast Salish-owned tea company. Their small batch teas are sourced from plants in their Xwemeltchsn community garden in West Vancouver, through wild picking, and from local herbal distributors. Red Lake Nation Foods (Red Lake Nation): A member of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Red Lake Nation Foods offers a selection of herbal teas and tea blends in addition to wild fruit jellies, jams and syrups, and Red Lake Nation–cultivated wild rice. Serengeti Teas & Spices (Africa): This Harlem fixture isn’t just for herbal teas, although it carries a wide variety, including moringa, Moroccan mint teas, sorrel, South African Rooibos, and turmeric blends. It also specializes in premium and rare coffee, tea, and cocoa from countries around Africa. Song Tea & Ceramics (China and Taiwan): With new selections of teas from China and Taiwan each year, Song Tea is an excellent source for fresh leaves, including green, white, oolong, red, and aged teas. It also offers botanical blends like sobacha, marshmallow, holy basil, and carrot. For those with the budget, Song also offers a small collection of rare aged teas. Té Company (Taiwan): With a small tearoom in lower Manhattan and an impressive online shop, Té first got its start by partnering with fine dining restaurants. It specializes in high quality full leaf oolong tea from Taiwan that would otherwise not be available in the U.S. Besides oolong, it offers green, white, black, and herbal teas, including rare and vintage selections. Everything is sourced directly from tea producers. Tea Drunk (China): Another tea oasis in lower Manhattan with a stocked online shop, Tea Drunk is unique in that it sources and imports directly from heritage tea growers in China. A (virtual) visit to Tea Drunk is an education in and celebration of terroir, season, and craft across green, yellow, white, Wu Long, red, and black teas, including pu’ehr. Katie Okamoto is a Los Angeles–based writer and former editor at Metropolis, the New York–based design and architecture monthly. Find her work at katieokamoto.com and occasionally on Twitter and Instagram. Photo credits: Hand: Prostock-Studio/GettyShelves: Arman Zhenikeyev/Getty from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3hU75iR

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-socially-conscious-shoppers-guide.html

[morrisbrokaw]

TIMBERLAND COMMITS TO PLANT 50 MILLION TREES OVER NEXT FIVE YEARS

Company launches “Nature Needs Heroes” campaign to empower global community to be champions for the planet

Global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland today announced a new commitment to plant 50 million trees around the world by 2025 as part of its pursuit of a greener future. This bold goal builds on Timberland’s longstanding commitment to make products responsibly, strengthen communities, and protect and enhance the outdoors. One key area of focus has been tree planting; since 2001, the brand has planted more than 10 million trees worldwide.

  According to new research led by Swiss University ETH Zürich, the restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation, and a worldwide planting program could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. Trees help to clean air by removing carbon and releasing oxygen into the air; cool the air through evaporation; prevent erosion and save water, and more. Over the next five years, Timberland will support multiple re-forestation initiatives around the world in support of a greener future.

  “At Timberland, we’re conscious of the impact our modern way of life has on the planet. And we believe as a global lifestyle brand, and as individuals, we have a responsibility to make it better,” said Jim Pisani, global brand president, Timberland. “Trees and green spaces help improve the quality of our planet as well as individual wellbeing. Our commitment to plant trees is a real, measurable way to act upon our belief that a greener future is a better future. We encourage people everywhere to join the movement by taking their own actions – small or large – to be heroes for nature.”

  To kick off its pledge, Timberland has launched its largest-ever global campaign, “Nature Needs Heroes,” calling on consumers around the world to join the movement by taking simple, small actions for a healthier planet. Harnessing the brand’s passion for nature and the energy of fashion, the campaign celebrates 12 eco-heroes who are making lasting, positive change for the environment and their communities. Each hero dons new styles from the fall 2019 collection, with city greenscapes as the backdrop.

  The campaign will come to life through robust media activations across print, digital, out of home, social media and PR. The brand will also engage the global community to be heroes for nature through a series of tree planting and greening events, including:

A three-day pop-up park and urban greening event in New York City where consumers can meet the heroes, make pledges to live a greener life and enhance their local community

A REMADE workshop in Shanghai, China featuring Timberland’s Global Creative Director Christopher Raeburn and APAC eco-hero, Will Pan to advocate responsible design and call on consumers to take simple actions for a better future.

Greening events in London, Paris, Milan, Berlin and Amsterdam where Timberland will work together with the communities on local greening projects and call on consumers to take their own actions for change.

To help realize its 50 million tree commitment, Timberland will partner with a range of organizations that support the environment through large-scale regreening and tree planting efforts. These organizations include the Smallholder Farmers Alliance, GreenNetwork, TREE AID, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Connect4Climate – World Bank Group, Justdiggit, Las Lagunas Ecological Park, Trees for the Future, American Forests and Treedom.

  Projects in year one will focus on Haiti, China, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Tanzania and Mali – including support of the Great Green Wall, an African-led movement to grow an 8,000km line of trees across the entire width of Africa to fight climate change, drought, famine, conflict, and migration.

“We are thrilled to have Timberland join the Great Green Wall movement – an emerging new world wonder that promises to grow hope for millions of people in the face of the 21st century’s most urgent challenges,” said Mr. Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

“I believe anyone can be a hero for nature just by doing something small on a daily basis,” said Inna Modja, international musician, activist, and ambassador for the Great Green Wall. “Recycle every day, buy fair trade products, research clothing, food, and coffee — at every step you can do something. If you are aware of these little things you can do, you will find yourself doing more and more.” A native of Mali, Modja is one of the eco-heroes being featured in the Nature Needs Heroes campaign.

  To learn more about Timberland’s tree planting commitment and Nature Needs Heroes campaign, visit the brand’s responsibility site.

  About Timberland

Founded in 1973, Timberland is a global outdoor lifestyle brand based in Stratham, New Hampshire, with international headquarters in Switzerland and Hong Kong. Best known for its original yellow boot designed for the harsh elements of New England, Timberland today offers a full range of footwear, apparel and accessories for people who value purposeful style and share the brand’s passion for enjoying – and protecting – nature.

  At the heart of the Timberland® brand is the core belief that a greener future is a better future. This comes to life through a decades-long commitment to make products responsibly, protect the outdoors, and strengthen communities around the world. To share in Timberland’s mission to step outside, work together and make it better, visit one of our stores, timberland.com or follow us @timberland. Timberland is a VF Corporation brand.

  About the Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall is an African-led movement to grow an 8000km line of trees across the entire width of Africa to fight climate change, drought, famine, conflict, and migration. Timberland is partnering with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and Connect4Climate – World Bank Group as part of the UNCCD-led campaign ‘Growing a World Wonder’ which supports the Great Green Wall.  TREE AID – an international development organization that focuses on unlocking the potential of trees to reduce poverty and protect the environment in Africa – is planting trees in Mali as a key partner in the campaign.

  About Smallholder Farmers Alliance

The Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) works to help feed and reforest a renewed Haiti by establishing farmer cooperatives, building agricultural export markets, creating rural farm businesses, and contributing to community development. Timberland has worked with SFA since 2010, to plant millions of trees in Haiti, establish nurseries and the jobs that come with them, and reintroduce cotton farming to the nation – helping to not only improve the environment, but the incomes and livelihoods of thousands of Haitian farmers.

  About Trees for the Future

Trees for the Future revitalizes land by providing farmers with tree seeds, technical training, and on-site planning assistance. Timberland is working with Trees for the Future in Kenya and/or Senegal to educate and empower farmers to plant trees around their crops. This helps smallholder farming families increase their yields to make a better living and send their children to school.

  About Green Network

Since 2001, Timberland has partnered with Japanese NGO Green Network, to plant trees in the Horqin Desert, quelling sandstorms and improving the air quality for the East Asia and Pacific region, including Japan. Green Network is a grassroots environmental NGO headquartered in Yokohama, Japan. It is committed to cultivating environmental awareness and enhancing the consciousness and enthusiasm of the public to participate in the prevention and control of desertification. Since 2000, Green Network has carried out a multitude of projects related to sand control and greening. And since 2014, they have been working in Mongolia to green the lost grassland.

  About Las Lagunas Ecological Park

Timberland has worked with Las Lagunas Ecological Park in Santiago, Dominican Republic to grow tree seedlings to be distributed to local communities in need. These trees provide shade, clean the air, and offer fresh fruit to community members. Timberland owns a footwear factory in the Dominican Republic. The factory employees volunteer to work with Las Lagunas on greening projects throughout the year.

  About Justdiggit

Justdiggit is a non-profit organization that makes dry lands green again on a large scale. Justdiggit restores degraded landscapes by empowering local communities through  landscape restoration techniques such as Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). This brings brings back millions of trees with strong benefits to nature, wildlife, people and climate. Justdiggit also employs harvesting rainwater techniques to restore the natural water cycle, which significantly improves soil health, enables tree growth and positively impacts biodiversity and food security for local communities. Through their partnership, Justdiggit and Timberland will grow nearly 10 million trees in rural Tanzania.

  About American Forests

Founded in 1875 as the American Forestry Association, American Forests is the oldest national conservation organization in the U.S. Today, American Forests creates healthy and resilient forests from cities to wilderness that deliver essential benefits for climate, people, water, and wildlife. Timberland has partnered with American Forests to plant trees in six key ecosystems in the United States. In addition to making a financial contribution, Timberland also invites consumers to support American Forests and donate a dollar to plant a tree to protect, preserve, and improve our collective outdoors.

  About Treedom

Treedom is an EU-based company that promotes the implementation of agro-forestry projects around the world. Since its foundation in 2010 in Florence, more than 600,000 trees have been planted in Africa, South America and Italy through Treedom. All trees are planted directly by local farmers and bring environmental, social and financial benefits to their communities Timberland is partnering with Treedom to plant trees in Ghana as part of Africa’s Great Green Wall project.

TIMBERLAND COMMITS TO PLANT 50 MILLION TREES OVER NEXT FIVE YEARS published first on https://workbootsandshoes.tumblr.com/

[zeebirdskingdom]

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[cliftonsteen]

Why Food Security Is a Coffee Industry Issue

Producers are amongst the most vulnerable members of the coffee supply chain. Many are already contending against inconsistent and insufficient incomes, which is why in times of crisis, food security can become a pressing issue.

If left unchecked, insufficient food security could force coffee farmers to abandon production entirely. Here’s what the implications of this are, and how food security experts recommend addressing the problem.

You may also like Thin Months: Why Are Coffee Producers Going Hungry?

Food Insecurity’s Impact on Coffee Producers

According to the United Nations, food security is “hav[ing] physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets [a person’s] food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” While there’s the perception that the number of undernourished people has been declining, it’s actually been rising since 2015.

Despite growing food, many producing countries face food insecurity, as many are in developing nations with high poverty and inequality levels. Because of this, it’s estimated that almost half of all smallholder coffee producers live in poverty. While most are located in East Africa, several are in Latin America and Asia.

Coffee producers tend to encounter food insecurity between harvests. Rick Peyser is Senior Relationship Manager at Lutheran World Relief, an international aid organisation. He says “the livelihoods of most small-scale coffee farming families are… dependent upon income from coffee. Many coffee farming families contend with three to eight months of food scarcity every year. This period, [is] known as ‘los meses flacos’ or the ‘thin months’”.

Unexpected crises, such as flooding or 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic can exacerbate matters so that food scarcity becomes a challenge throughout the year. Janice Nadworny is Co-Director of Food4Farmers, an organisation dedicated to overcoming food insecurity in coffee-producing communities. She says farms “simply can’t produce enough coffee to earn an adequate living that covers food costs and other necessities. Governments provide few public services. [The Coronavirus] pandemic will worsen the situation for rural communities, [that are] now being cut off from supplies, and without adequate cash to secure food in areas where prices have already tripled.”

With governments closing borders and ports to imports and exports, a private food supply could ease the virus’s impact until physical and economic restrictions ease. Marcela Pino is the Director of Food4Farmers, and says, “the communities that are able to grow food… aren’t severely affected by closed roads, as this [can] make it impossible for food supplies to be transported to certain towns/rural areas.”

Coffee prices have long been unable to cover coffee production costs, and unpredictable and challenging weather patterns are likely to become more frequent in the future. This makes food security something that should be prioritized, as it will also keep coffee producers invested in coffee production.

What Happens When Coffee Producers Have Food Security?

Food security does more than keep coffee producers fed. As Marcela explains, it can indicate the state of a community’s well being and help identify further issues. Here are some side effects of food insecurity.

Coffee Producers’ Health is Impacted

Food insecurity means that coffee producers go without healthy food, or eat less of it. According to Ralph Merriam, a Lutheran World Relief Honduras Representative, this will result in fewer meals being eaten or the compositions of meals changing to contain less protein.

Food security requires food to be nutritious. Without access to this, Marcela says consumption of unhealthy and processed foods will increase, which can lead to lifestyle-related health issues. She adds that this has led to an increase in diseases in coffee-growing communities, which is made worse by the lack of reliable healthcare.

Poor nutrition can lead to long term issues that can impact quality of life. Janice says that levels of widespread malnutrition, childhood stunting, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease have increased since 2010.

Families Are Affected

When producing communities don’t have food security, everyone suffers. Often it leads to families breaking up, with producers leaving for better paying jobs in other areas. Some end up in debt trying to keep up with food costs, which might mean that there’s no money left over for school fees or other household expenses. 

Children growing up under such circumstances might abandon coffee production instead of as a job as it could be seen as a costly endeavour that can’t meet anyone’s needs. It’s something that’s already happening in Rwanda and Kenya.

Metal silos for storing dried beans and corn harvested from San Jeronimo’s Family Gardens

Production Is Abandoned & Coffee Quality Is Reduced

If coffee producers can’t sustain food security, coffee farming may not continue. Ralph says that when lines of credit are exhausted and the funds spent on food, assets that aren’t being used due to the COVID-19 pandemic (or because the harvest season is over) will be sold. When production resumes, farming can’t proceed.

Rick explains that “Farmers will naturally use limited resources to feed their families first before they ‘feed’ coffee plants. When families are hungry, coffee plants also go without needed inputs which results in lower yields, poorer quality, and lower prices. This has left coffee farming families and coffee plants hungry for vital nutrition.”

Others might continue production, but reduce production consistency and quality, as there is no time, capacity or finances to improve it. Ralph says that when farmers aren’t preoccupied with food security, productivity and resilience to pests and diseases can be improved. Better quality beans can be developed that fetch higher prices, which can encourage new buyers to be sought and crops to be diversified.

Why Money Alone Doesn’t Guarantee Food Security 

Increased food security benefits producers and the coffee industry. For Rick, the simplest steps to achieving this are paying farmers enough to cover production costs, and supporting programs that help diversify incomes and food sources to increase food security. He says this will help them secure an income that supports a decent living standard, secure nutritious food throughout the year, and invest in coffee production.

It’s important to note that money alone can’t solve the issue and that education and training might be needed. As Marcela explains, “Food security isn’t necessarily a purely financial issue. It can be related to a lack of access to resources… a lack of knowledge of how to grow food, and a lack of education”.

Janice says that without this, the negative habits created by food insecurity might continue. “More income is crucial, but not enough on its own to ensure food security. If there’s no food being grown locally, coffee-farming communities will still rely on unhealthy processed foods being trucked in.”

Equip Coffee Producers to Grow & Sell Food

Helping coffee producers grow their own food is the first step towards helping feed families – but its benefits extend beyond this. This food can be consumed during thin months and sold to markets for additional income. Farmers in a community can cultivate different crops and exchange it amongst each other. 

This will decrease reliance on charity and on coffee as a livelihood. It will also empower them to make decisions that benefit local communities – instead of having limited options or resources.

Train Coffee Producers to Improve Farming Practices 

For coffee producers to take charge of food security by growing their own food, they’ll need to realise that land can be used for more than coffee production. Marcela says that coffee producers should understand that land can be used for cash crops, growing food, and intercropping.

Some might not have access to the latest recommendations and practices on improving farming. Education and training can introduce climate-smart agricultural and agroforestry practices so that when extreme weather patterns and market price volatility hamper production, other crops can be produced. 

Janice adds that agroecological experience will also help improve farm and ecosystem health and progress tracking. It can also encourage the development of an expertise that can be applied to all business dealings. 

Nicaraguan coffee producer Juana Valle and her passion fruit plants.

Speaking to just one person can demonstrate the real-world impact that food security can have on lives and communities.

Juana Valle is a Nicaraguan producer who’d been struggling with food insecurity for months. By diversifying her coffee farm and dedicating a hectare to passion fruit production, she doubled her income in 18 months and could employ three people from her community. Her family is now food secure, and she’s using her profits to improve the quality of coffee her farm produces.

This has helped increase Juana’s resilience and helped her break out of a cycle of poverty. By helping others access the same benefits, it will help create a more equal relationship dynamic between producers and other coffee supply chain members, which will create a healthier and more sustainable model that everyone benefits from.

Enjoyed this? Then Read Does Producing Coffee Mean Living in Poverty? Examining The Data

Photo credits: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Lutheran World Relief, Perfect Daily Grind

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Post-harvest wastage affects the development of agriculture in Kenya

check out the link to learn more : http://info.afrindex.com/detail_1461/

While millions of Kenyans are struggling to cope with drought-induced hunger, post-harvest wastage remains widespread in Kenya due to poor storage and handling, transport, and fungi attack. Actually, Kenya is importing cereal using hard-to-come-by foreign currency to buy cereal it could easily produce. 

In 2017, Sh150 billion worth of food went to waste, tossed out or left to rot, a report that tries to track food waste has said. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), farmers lost earnings as they struggled to manage, store, and transport their produce to the market. The growers lost over 1.9 million tonnes of food, even as millions of Kenyans grappled with starvation fuelled by debilitating drought. Maize, Kenya’s staple food, was the hardest hit, with farmers losing Sh29.6 billion to post-harvest wastage, including rodents and poor handling. The harvest was also affected by aflatoxin, a toxin produced by fungi due to exposure to moisture. The volume of maize lost during this period - about six million bags - is the equivalent of what the country gets from the short rains of September to December, experts said. Kenya imported maize worth 42 billion, using hard-to-come-by foreign currency to buy cereal it could easily produce. Weevil invasion Tonnes of green bananas were also lost, with farmers foregoing over Sh24 billion in a year when the food security situation in the country plunged to a 10-year low. “We are the only country in the world where weevils compete with human beings in eating maize,” said Bitange Ndemo, an associate professor at the University of Nairobi's Business School and a former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication. Other produce that went to waste due to poor storage and handling, transport, and fungi attack, according to data contained in the 2018 Economic Survey released last week, includes Irish potatoes (Sh19.7 billion), milk (Sh12.4 billion), beans (Sh11.5 billion), bananas (Sh5.6 billion), sweet potatoes (Sh3.5 billion), tomatoes (Sh2.4 billion), pineapples (Sh2.4 billion), sorghum (Sh1.9 billion), and millet (Sh1.6 billion). Every year, the country loses about a third of its produce through post-harvest losses and food wastage by consumers who buy more than they need, explained Timothy Njagi, a research fellow at Tegemeo Institute, an agricultural think tank. This has an impact on the country’s food security and reduces profitability for farmers. The Government has estimated post-harvest losses at 20 per cent. As part of its Big Four agenda, the State plans to cut these losses to 15 per cent by 2022. President Uhuru Kenyatta also plans to waive duty on costly cereal drying equipment, hematic bags, grain cocoons/silos, and feed to minimise post-harvest losses. “The Government will also transform the Strategic Food Reserve by promoting investments in post-harvest handling through public private partnerships, and by contracting farmers and other commercial off-takers,” said the National Treasury in the Budget Policy Statement for 2018. Fish production, is also a casualty of post-harvest losses, has also been roped into the Government’s development agenda. It is keen to establish commercialised feedlots for fish and offering incentives for post-harvest technologies. Dr Njagi said post-harvest losses occurred through poor management, storage, and conveyance as the crop moves from the farm to the market. Dr Ndemo, who put post-harvest losses and food waste at between 40 and 50 per cent, said there was a need to develop better supply chains so that farmers take their produce to market as fast as possible. Njagi told of a case of the Japan International Corporation Agency, which had managed to reduce the quantity of rice normally lost through manual harvesting by over 30 per cent by simply introducing combined harvesting machines. “Normally, rice farmers and many others, use the log and thrash method, where the rice is hit with a log,” said Njagi, adding that the grain was rejected in the market because of impurities. “The same thing happens with beans and green grams, where logs are used to remove the beans from the pods. Farmers sweep to recover the harvest, but they can’t collect all of it,” explained Njagi. Even with a good storage facility, you need good management, said Njagi. Ndemo said a commodity exchange should be created to save farmers from being exploited by brokers. “We need to create aggregation centres or warehouse where a farmer in Murang’a, instead of taking two trays of eggs to Nairobi, can take them there and be given a receipt,” said Ndemo. The receipt can becomes a tradeable commodity, he explained, noting that fish farmers should also be provided with cold storage facilities so that they do not have to resort to panic selling. “This way, they are able to quote their price and stay with their produce if they are not getting a better price,” said Ndemo. Njagi said the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has introduced underground refrigerators where produce can be stored as it awaits collection. Njagi said good storage facilities alone were not the solution. “While some maize farmers have good storage facilities, the way they store the grain exposes it to humidity and oxygen, thus leading to aflatoxin infection,” said Njagi. Cold storage trucks are ideal for transporting perishable produce such as tomatoes and milk, but they are expensive. The experts called for scientific methods of determining post-harvest loss, complaining that most of the figures being thrown around were not scientifically determined, making it difficult for the authorities to take action. Mangoes rotting “You need to establish what loss is likely to occur and where so you can have an appropriate response,” said Njagi. He added that most large-scale farmers did not transport their crops using pit bags, instead using normal bags. Fruits and vegetables, particularly tomatoes, are transported in wooden boxes, resulting in losses. In eastern Kenya, mangoes rot because picky buyers reject them for insignificant reasons such as having spots. “It does not mean that they are not edible. They can be eaten, it is only that buyers tend to pick first grade and everything else goes to waste,” Njagi said. Such fruits can be blended into juice. Makueni County has set up a mango juice factory, which will go a long way in stemming losses.

[cryptochurp]

IBM’s Blockchain Venture to Offer Microloans to Small Businesses in Africa

American multinational technology company IBM is forging ahead with a piloted blockchain-based finance solution to help small businesses throughout Africa. IBM’s research wing successfully accomplished a blockchain-based micro-lending pilot project with Twiga Foods, a Kenyan logistics company. The project uses Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain framework implementation that acts as a bedrock for developing applications and solutions.

Also see: Japanese Police Arrest 12 in Bitcoin (Actually Yen) Fraud

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Retailers Profit from Blockchain-based Microlending Project

Kenyan-based Twiga foods used mobile technology to develop a supply chain for farmers and traders. However, to scale its business boundaries and offer microloans to those businesses, Twiga joined the tech giant to employ blockchain technology to develop a transparent market ecosystem.

The blockchain-enabled micro-financing pilot program handled over 220 loans provided to food retailers across Kenya. The average loan amount was around $30 USD, at a one- to two-percent interest rate for a repayment period between four to eight days. The initiative extended routine orders by 30 percent and found that, on average, retailer profits increased by 6 percent.

Andrew Kinai, the lead research engineer at IBM Research, said:

“We had several iterations of the platform based on feedback from the retailers. The SMS-based solution provided an effective channel for a diverse set of users, some with limited IT literacy, to access financing for their orders.”

IBM Plans for an Interdependent Ecosystem in Africa

The aim of the program was to develop an entire interdependent ecosystem. Initially, Twiga zeroed in on logistics, transporting fruit and vegetables from farms to retail stores. However, with microlending, retailers could use the extra cash to buy more, while farmers could sell additional products. Twiga benefited from the interest it earned and the boost in business.

The project only required a retailer to own a mobile phone, which most Africans do, and all they needed was capital to grow the business. The IBM blockchain program aims to fill the finance gap so small ventures can flourish on the African continent.

Isaac Markus, a researcher on the inclusive financial services group at IBM Research in Kenya, was quoted explaining the blockchain program on Capital Business:

“After analyzing purchase records from a mobile device, we used machine learning algorithms to predict creditworthiness, in turn giving lenders the confidence they need to provide microloans to small businesses. Once the credit score is determined, we used a blockchain, based on the Hyperledger Fabric, to manage the entire lending process from application to receiving offers to accepting the terms to repayment.”

Such projects prove that blockchain technology fever is not only rampant among multinational companies, but also small businesses that consider it groundbreaking technology able to solve real-life problems. The reason for using blockchain is that it is secure and transparent in nature. No individual or single entity can alter entries on the Distributed Ledger.

Alteration is only possible with the consensus of the entire network. Moreover, a smart contract on Distributed Ledger technology is more efficient and quicker to process than paper-based loans. The banking infrastructure is underdeveloped in Africa, yet the blockchain venture plans to involve banks in the future. The success of the pilot project has led IBM to spread the program throughout Africa.

Will the adoption of blockchain technology increase on the African continent? Share your views in the comments section below.

Images via Pixnio, Pxhere

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Finding The Right Coffee To Suit Your Needs

It isn’t always easy to pick out a bag of beans at your favorite café or roastery. There is so much information available, but not much of an explanation, particularly for factors like altitude and tasting notes.

We put together a simple guide on how you can pick the right coffee for your preferences, no matter how experienced you are. 

To learn more, I spoke with Crawford Hawkins and Viviana Salazar from Harvest, an online marketplace for consumers and wholesale buyers, and Allie Caran, the Director of Education at Partners Coffee.

You may also like How Specialty Coffee Blends Have Evolved For Today’s Market

Where Does Your Coffee Come From?

The Harvest platform allows for guaranteed purchases of ethically sourced and traceable coffee

Coffee generally grows along the “bean belt”, a collection of more than 50 countries near the equator. These regions offer the best climate for coffee farming, including consistent temperatures of between 21 and 29°C and sufficient rainfall. 

The major coffee producing regions are Central and South America, Africa and Indonesia. By looking at where a coffee has been produced, you can get a general idea of its flavor profile (although this is not always conclusive).

Central American coffees – including those from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica – are more “traditional” coffees that tend to have nutty, chocolatey flavors. They often have a mellow sweetness, with notes of toffee and brown sugar, and are lower in acidity.

South American coffees – including those from Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia – often have chocolate or soft fruit flavors. Brazilian coffees tend to have a thicker texture – known as a heavy body, or mouthfeel – and their flavors vary widely as coffee in Brazil is grown at different altitudes. 

African coffees – including those from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Burundi – are usually fruity and floral, with berry and citrus flavors. They typically have higher levels of acidity, which results in a refreshing, lighter-bodied cup of coffee. Coffees from Indonesia, however, typically have a heavy body with earthy or smoky flavors.

These are generalisations, but choosing coffee based on origin can often be a simple and effective way to find a coffee that suits your taste. There are, however, a number of different factors that affect the flavor and texture of your cup.

How Do Growing Conditions Affect A Coffee’s Flavor?

Coffee cherries from Finca San Rafael, a coffee farm in Copan, Honduras

There are a wide range of environmental factors that affect a coffee’s flavor profile. 

Allie Caran is the Director of Education for Partners Coffee, a roaster with six cafés located throughout New York City. She explains how ecological variables impact flavor: “Factors like elevation, latitude, rainfall, soil health, and plant health determine a green coffee’s raw potential. They all leave their own unique impressions on the balance of flavors.”

These factors are collectively known as “terroir”, a French word used to describe the numerous natural growing conditions that affect how a crop grows.

A coffee plant’s elevation (or altitude) is measured in metres above sea level (m.a.s.l.). Coffee grown at a low altitude (1,000 to 1,250 m.a.s.l.) tends to have low acidity and some earthy characteristics. Coffee grown between 1,250 and 1,500 m.a.s.l., however, usually has more acidity and a juicier texture or mouthfeel. Finally, coffee grown above 1,500 m.a.s.l. often has a more refined acidity and sweetness.

Temperature is also important. The optimum temperature for the Coffea arabica plant is between 18 and 21°C. Within this range, the sugars and organic compounds in the coffee cherry are able to develop for a longer period of time. This creates a more complex and dense flavor profile.

Since coffee is a fruit, it has a range of varieties, all of which taste different when brewed. Typica, Bourbon, and Caturra are the three most commonly grown. Typica provides a sweet brew with lots of clarity, while Bourbon has a more complex flavour. Caturra is usually less sweet, with refreshing acidity and a much lighter mouthfeel. 

When buying coffee, make sure you check details about things like the coffee’s variety and elevation. After you brew it, make a note of how much you like it in comparison to other coffees you’ve tasted, and what the differences were.

Choosing Ethical And Sustainable Coffee

Through Harvest’s sister company, Propina, the sale connects the producer and the buyer

A lot of consumers want to make conscious and informed decisions when they buy coffee. Customers will often want information on who grew their coffee and whether or not they were paid fairly. Terms like “sustainable” and “ethical” are often used to describe a coffee’s production, but what do they actually mean?

Allie explains: “True sustainability [means] mutual growth and success along the entire supply chain.”

She adds: “Collaborating with Harvest allows us to expand upon this, with 5% of [each] sale going directly back to our producing partners.”

Crawford Hawkins is the CEO and founder of Harvest and Propina. He explains how this works: “Harvest is an online marketplace that allows for guaranteed purchases of ethically sourced and traceable coffee.

“Propina is a non-profit that we established to provide financial tools for smallholder farmers, including weather insurance and working capital. Harvest pays the extra 5% as a donation to Propina. This serves as an additional premium on top of the fair prices paid by our partners, designed to reinforce and certify an ethical supply chain.”

Viviana, Harvest’s Chief Financial Officer, says it’s more important than ever to buy traceable and ethical coffee. “Environmentally-conscious, ethically-driven supply chains are at our fingertips. Taking action in favor of equality and sustainability does not have to cost more money or time.” 

Crawford also explains that Harvest provides other businesses with the ability to illustrate their commitment to ethically-sourced, traceable coffee. “The Harvest Private Label Service allows specialty coffee to be an extension of a particular brand. 

“Our custom-designed bags and equipment allows businesses to give their employees, clients, and other stakeholders the right coffee to suit their needs.”

It isn’t just farmers who benefit from more ethical and sustainable coffee supply chains, either. Better wages and fairer treatment mean that producers can grow higher quality coffee. This means a better cup for the consumer, showing that everyone in the supply chain benefits.

What Is Processing?

Before coffee can be roasted and brewed, the beans have to be separated from the cherry. This stage is known as processing, and it has profound effects on a coffee’s flavor, sweetness, and body.

Washed processing is popular among farmers, as it allows them more control over the coffee’s flavor profile. This involves removing the fruit from the beans and leaving them to soak in water for between 12 and 24 hours. This displaces the mucilage, which is a thick, sugary layer that coats the beans.

Coffee beans drying on a raised bed

The beans are then placed on raised beds or patios to dry. Once dried, the paper-like parchment layer is removed, leaving the green coffee bean, ready to be roasted. Washed coffees generally have clean, bright, and vibrant flavors with higher levels of acidity. 

In regions where access to a water source is less readily available, natural (dry) processing is more common. In this method, cherries are picked and then dried on a raised bed. With this method, the beans absorb more sugar from the fruit, resulting in a sweeter flavor and a heavier body.

There is also honey (pulped natural) processing, where some fruit is left on the bean before it is dried. Honey processing generally leaves the coffee with a flavor somewhere between both methods: it combines the brightness of washed coffees with the complexity of naturally processed coffees.

If you’re seeking a clearer flavor and lighter texture, then you should consider washed coffees. Comparatively, naturals often have a heavier body and a sweeter flavor. Choose honey processed coffees for something in between.

How Roasting Affects Flavor

Coffees on the Harvest platform are roasted in the US or at origin

Roasting brings out the flavors and aromas that are “hidden” inside green coffee beans. The higher the temperature a coffee is roasted to, the darker it gets.

In light roasts, most of the coffee’s natural flavor profile remains intact. This makes it easier to pick up on more delicate and subtle tastes, and the coffee’s acidity is more noticeable.

In medium roasts, the acidity is balanced with a heavier body. This means you can still taste the “origin flavors” of the coffee, but the texture will be heavier. 

Dark roasts obtain most of their flavor from the roasting process as the sugars are almost completely broken down. This makes it much harder to detect any acidity, and often results in bolder, heavier flavors with some bitterness. 

Coffees are often roasted to different levels for different brewing methods. For example, light to medium roasts are generally used for filter coffee, while darker roasts are used for espresso. 

Viviana explains that Harvest provides coffees that are roasted in the US or at origin. She tells me that a good partnership between the roaster and the producer allows the consumer to experience the full scope of a region.

When choosing coffees at different roast levels, it’s important to keep in mind your brewing method as well as your preferences. If you’re after a bolder and heavier coffee, choose a darker roast; for acidity and a more delicate flavour, aim for a lighter roast.

Useful Tips For Selecting Your Beans

QR codes on Harvest packaging connect the consumer with the producer

As a general rule, blends are used for drinks containing milk, while single origin coffees are usually drunk black. This is because blends are typically created to emphasize mouthfeel or body. Single origin coffees often have a more nuanced and complex flavor, which can be masked when milk is added.

If you want to expand your palate, try eating a range of foods that are commonly found in coffee, including chocolates, fruits, and spices. This can help you to identify flavors in coffee and decide on your preferences. 

Resources like the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel are also useful for pinpointing specific flavors or tasting notes. Crawford explains that Harvest also sells sustainable chocolates and spices as well as coffee. “We sell a delicious single-origin allspice from Central Guatemala. We also feature a single-origin coffee from just a few miles away.”

Cupping is an effective way to develop your palate. It is a common practice in the specialty coffee industry, and is used to assess a coffee’s quality and flavor profile. Tasting a variety of coffees that are characteristically different will allow you to compare a number of different flavors and textures, and teach you how to pick up on them.

Develop your palate by drinking more coffee

However, there’s ultimately only one way to refine your preferences: drink more coffee! Allie says: “As you try new offerings, evaluate what you like; the flavor, the body, how it makes you feel… there really is no right or wrong way to select coffee. The best advice I can give is not to be afraid to try new things.”

It’s important to have an open mind when you’re trying to discover which flavors and textures you want in a cup of coffee. However, a deeper understanding of the information displayed on coffee bags will allow you to make more informed purchasing decisions.

Enjoyed this? Then read How To Understand The Label On Your Bag Of Roasted Coffee

Photo credits: Partners Coffee, Neil Soque, Ivan Petrich, Julio Guevara, Gisselle Guerra

Please note: Harvest is a sponsor of Perfect Daily Grind.

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