The Rwandan Farmer
Rwanda has nearly 500,000 small-holder coffee producers who possess an average of 200 coffee trees each. Each small plantation is managed like a small garden and is the principal generator of cash for rural Rwanda. Depending on annual production volumes and the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) commodity price for coffee, the Rwanda coffee sector has generated between $15 million and $35 million in annual foreign exchange earnings.
Rwanda has a comparative advantage over most coffee origins since farmers can give maximum husbandry skills to the small garden-like coffee plots where the old heirloom ‘bourbon’ varieties still reign. This is where quality is ‘created’; the interaction between the farmer and his trees. However, because the Rwandan coffee farm is so small, it takes about 500 of them to produce one container load of exportable green coffee! The organizational burden on processing plant management is great. Trucks must be rented and cherry collection points must be installed in order to get the cherry from the farm to the processing plant or washing station. They can’t use animal transport because of over population and lack of biomass to feed the animals. Hundreds of farmers walk in their cherries from their fields two to four kilometers to the collection points, they sit, they wait for the truck, they wait for weighing and quality control, they load the truck and off it goes to the washing station.
If the transport time of cherries coming from the coffee field to the washing station was reduced to from six to 12 hours down to two to four, research has shown that cup quality will increase significantly from 82/100 to 86/100 on sensory evaluation scores from which coffee price is determined. This translates into a $0.15 or higher premium per pound of green coffee sold.
So, what affordable means can farmers employ to decrease the transport time of cherries? Learn more about The Coffee Bike.
