by Katie Blasl
They may have traveled halfway across the world for the chance to see a coffee plant, but it was the deeply impoverished conditions that pervaded the lives of the farmers there that left the greatest impact.
During their week on a Guatemalan coffee farm, North Fork Roasting Company owners Jess Dunne and Jennilee Morris saw men make hour-long treks down a mountain with 100-pound bags hoisted over their shoulders, families living in tin huts and farmers working long, grueling hours in the hot sun for just a few dollars a day.
“It was definitely a life-changing experience,” Morris said in an interview Friday. “It really was eye-opening to see how much work goes into it, and how little they get paid.”
The two women traveled to Guatemala during the first week of March through a combination of volunteer and economic booster programs that help Guatemalan farmers combine forces to sell their product.
There, they spent the week immersed in the daily life of a Guatemalan coffee farm, getting acquainted with each step of the laborious coffee harvesting process. Their general manager, Brianna Paige, also went along and will continue working on the farm for the rest of the month.
For the pair of coffee-loving entrepreneurs, who opened the North Fork Roasting Company on Southold’s Main Road last February, it was an experience unlike any other.
“We were obviously already obsessed with coffee, but we appreciate it so much more now,” Morris said.
They recounted the first time they were able to pick cherries – the red and green berries that contain coffee beans inside.
“I’ve been in the coffee industry for almost ten years now, and that was the first time I ever saw a coffee plant in person,” Morris said. “It was the first time I ever picked a cherry.”
“We were both almost in tears,” Dunne said, and then, laughing, added, “We’re really nerdy about it.”
But even more meaningful than the opportunity to harvest coffee were the friendships they cultivated with the farmers in the process. They spent much of their time working with a 20-year-old farmer named Julio, who instantly earned the nickname “Batman” from his t-shirt bearing the superhero’s emblem.
“He was so sweet and excited to learn about things from our point of view,” Dunne said.
Julio spends most of his days caring for his father’s coffee farm. He only began speaking English in the past year, but he speaks it “amazingly,” Dunne said. By the end of the week, they were already making plans to maintain communication and even arranging to trade.
“When we found out about the type of compensation they receive… Someone out in the fields picking cherries all day long, carrying those heavy bags back – they’ll make under eight dollars a day,” Morris said. “We want to do more direct trade so that money can go straight to them.”
De La Gente, the volunteer program that connected the two women with the farmers, was created exactly for that purpose.
The program organizes cooperatives of about 30 farms each, which combine their products together at the end of the harvesting process and export it to the United States.
Farmers earn up to 250 percent more this way than they would selling their coffee through other avenues, according to De La Gente’s website.
“These people are living in very poor areas,” Dunne said. “Some of the machinery they have isn’t really machinery at all. They use a bike that you have to pedal manually to de-pulp the beans.”
“All the cherries are hand-picked,” Morris added. “They don’t get ripe at the same time, so you literally have to handpick each individual one based on color.”
And if a single unripened green cherry gets mixed up in a batch of ripe red cherries, it can taint the taste of the entire batch. “You have to be really particular,” Dunne said. “It can be really tedious work.”
The Guatemalan coffee farmers are just emerging from the aftershocks of a plant fungus that ruined about 80 percent of the country’s crop in 2012. The fungus, called rust or roya in Spanish, would eat up the leaves of the coffee plant, depriving the cherries of the shade they need to ripen and causing them to shrivel up in the sun.
“It was pretty dire,” Morris said. “They had to cut all their trees way down and let them regrow.”
For a country that depends on coffee as its largest export, such a loss was devastating for its farmers. Coffee plants take about three years to start producing cherries, so it wasn’t until last year that they were able to sell their product again.
“One farmer’s yield last year was 15 bags, and this year, they did 35 bags,” Morris said. “This was their biggest year yet, so it was really cool to be a part of it, to work with these guys and see their excitement after all these years of struggle.”
The importance of coffee to Guatemala’s farmers was driven home by a conversation Morris had with a farmer toward the end of their trip. As they were preparing the coffee to be shipped out, Morris asked him what they called the final product, known in America as green coffee.
“He said they call it cafe oro, which means gold,” Morris recalled. “He said it’s the gold of Guatemala. It’s the gold for all the people, because everyone makes a living in coffee somehow.”
Morris and Dunne plan to start trading directly with the farmers they met in Guatemala, and they are already planning their trip back next January.
“This is the perfect time for us to get involved,” Morris said. “They’ve gotten over the hurdle of that plague, and now they’re thinking about the future. Now that their trees are producing, it’s like, what can we do to help you get to the next level? How can we bring this back to our community and help them enjoy the fruits of your labor?”
In the meanwhile, they are organizing a fundraising event April 2 at their coffee shop that will showcase Dunne’s photography from the trip. All proceeds from the event will be sent back to the farm cooperative, she said. “So they can do what they want with it – buy new equipment, or put it towards education or whatever they want.”
The event will feature coffee straight from the farm cooperative. “We’re going to talk about some of the things we learned while we were there,” Dunne said. “We want to give people a chance to know their coffee farmer, just like they know their farmers here on the North Fork.”
The art show will take place at the North Fork Roasting Company (55795 Main Rd, Southold) on Saturday, April 2 from 6 to 9 p.m.
