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Sustainability
The tale of a young coffee farmer
June 2007
ARMED with competent training on coffee farming through the help of leading coffee brand NESCAFÉ, 26-year-old Donald Nueva Ecija from Sultan Kudarat hopes to revive the family coffee farm.
An industrial engineering graduate, Nueva Ecija plans to apply what he learns from his free three-day coffee specialist course at Nestl Experimental and Development Farm (NEDF) in their farm in Liba, Sultan Kudarat.
The young coffee farmer is confident and optimistic that through proper coffee planting, cultivation, harvesting and processing techniques that he learned from NEDF, he would be able to increase their annual coffee production.
“Our coffee farm had suffered from numerous coffee agriculture malpractices in the past 17 years but it’s not yet too late to do what is right,” Nueva Ecija says.
“Before I took the course early this year, we used to grow the coffee trees as tall as they can be,” claims Nueva Ecija. “For years now our workers have difficulty harvesting coffee beans since they had to use ladders. Now I know it doesn’t have to be that way.”
NESCAFÉ advises farmers to stump old trees that are uneconomically harvestable to make them “young” and “productive”. This should be done every six to eight years after the first harvest to rejuvenate the coffee trees. By rejuvenating old coffee trees, it also cuts them down to a more manageable size.
To improve the yield of their farm’s traditional Robusta varieties, Nueva Ecija is working on grafting their existing trees with IC2, IC7, IC8 and S274, four Robusta clones that NEDF discovered well suited to Philippine climate and growing conditions after years of studies.
Next Generation Farmer
Nueva Ecija is taking the road less traveled by his generation. While most of his peers at Cebu Institute of Technology have opted to work in urban settings, Nueva Ecija goes back to his hometown to help his father run the coffee farm after graduation.
“Why not? The coffee farm has been very good to us,” says Nueva Ecija. “It has given us our bakery business, two motor vehicles, and provided college education to three of my siblings.”
Nueve Ecija’s father started the coffee farm in 1990 by buying two hectares of sloping farm land from members of the Manobo tribe, who eventually became their farm’s workers. Through the years their coffee farm grew to eight hectares.
In an average year, their farm produces 2.5 metric tons of green coffee beans (GCB), which they sell to NESCAFÉ Buying Station in Marbel. To encourage local coffee production, NESCAFÉ, the country’s leading instant soluble coffee, buys at current world market price and offers the best deal in the country with guaranteed payment within 8 working hours hours after acceptance of delivery. While the world market price usually hovers between Php50 to Php60 per kilo, this year it peaks at Php87.
“I know that I made the right choice,” Nueva Ecija reveals. “I see a lot of potential in coffee farming. I learned that if done right, a coffee farm can yield one to two metric tons of GCB per hectare. That’s more than half of what we produce in our farm.”
“I know this entails a lot of work,” adds Nueva Ecija. “But I know that NESCAFÉ will be there to help us.” |
