LINCOLN, Calif., U.S. – SF Bay Coffee hosted their 2019 Farmer’s Meeting in Kona, Hawaii this past week. The Rogers family wanted to gather the farmers they work with from around the world so that they could share their struggles and goals to better their own farms. This year, they picked Kona, Hawaii, where SF Bay Coffee owns their own farm.
Farmers from all over the world flew to Hawaii to attend this three-day meeting, coming from Rwanda, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
Farmer Training
After a long day of travel and a welcome luau the night before, the farmers spent their first full day at SF Bay Coffee’s farm. There were four different stations the farmers rotated around, learning about farm efficiency, drones, distillation, and yeast processing. During this day, each farmer received hands-on experience to exemplify how these techniques could impact their own farms.
Learning from Each Other
On the last day, many accomplished professionals in various fields presented the research they were carrying out on SF Bay Coffee’s farm.
The first speaker, Dr. Matthew Dahabieh, shared his studies on yeast and how its interaction with coffee can produce a more consistent product. Dr. Steven Ward and Dr. Keely Roth presented their work on efficiently monitoring coffee farms utilizing satellite imagery. Dr. Roxana Myers and Dr. Mario Serracin discussed ways to control root knot nematodes. Dr. Steven Tanksley presented about plant genomics, educating farmers about developing high quality crops. To ensure that everyone understood the speakers, each farmer was given a set of headphones that translated the speeches to Spanish. Translators walked around the meeting rooms, helping everyone understand each other’s questions.
A Bright Future
“These past years, we have all survived the coffee leaf rust, price fluctuation and unfair competition,” Andros Bracamontes, SF Bay Coffee’s Research & Development Specialist explains. “Now, we are all together and being successful at the Farmer’s Meeting 2019, learning from the past, analyzing our present challenges, and taking a look at the exciting future that certainly will change the coffee industry. We all feel proud to be doing things the correct way and for the right reasons. Coffee has changed the world in the past, and we will change it again.”
