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Sustainability

The company believes that helping improve their coffee farming methods and boosting their profits will result in an increase and better supply of coffee in the country.

Joel Lumagbas, head of the agricultural services division of Nestle Philippines, in fact reports that harvesting and processing have improved generally with many farmers delivering grade 1 to grade 2 beans.

“It’s not difficult for our farmers to double their yield,” Lumagbas professes. “All they have to do is put the right amount of fertilizer to their coffee trees and maintain them properly.”

A coffee farmer

In 1994, NESCAFÉ established the Nestle Experimental and Demonstration Farm (NEDF) in Tagum City, Davao del Norte where coffee farmers are trained on the proper way of growing coffee. It reinforced the importance of good plantation management and served as a venue for the conduct of experiments and production of planting materials. It has produced a number of brochures to further aid coffee farmers in improving their yield.

The NEDF also functions as a provider of high quality and high-yielding Robusta coffee planting materials to Filipino farmers. To date, it provides 80% of all Robusta cuttings in the Philippines.

In the last five years alone, the NEDF has distributed 5,631 kilos of coffee seeds, 235,564 coffee seedlings, and 204,822 rooted cuttings. This has generated an estimated 17,764 direct jobs in the country.

NESCAFÉ currently sources its coffee from around 100,000 Filipino farmers for years.  It also deals with about 300,000 other people in the country who are in one way involved in the planting, harvesting, or processing and trading of coffee and provides financial support to the National Coffee Development Board (NCDB) in assistance to its Organic Fertilizer Program.  The intention is to raise awareness of locally grown Philippine Coffee.

NESCAFÉ also supports coffee farmers through its buying policy. It commits to purchase all coffee produced in the country at a suitable price based on the prevailing world market price and NESCAFÉ coffee grading system. Green coffee beans are bought directly from farmers through various buying stations located in various parts of the country.

One of the programs that have greatly helped Filipino coffee farmers is NESCAFÉ’s Coffee-Based Sustainable Farming System (CBSFS).  It was launched three years ago in line with the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative of Nestle (SAIN), an advocacy promoted by Nestle worldwide. It helps farmers increase their income by allowing the planting of other crops in relatively the same amount of space as a mono-crop coffee plantation.

NESCAFÉ’s new method of farming uses coffee as a main crop and a variety of secondary crops to provide additional or alternative income for the farmers since it takes to time to reap coffee. It aims to lure farmers to plant coffee as their main crop by widening their income base, giving them the option to wait for the best time to sell their coffee.

The idea is simple: plant coffee tree rows five meters apart and spaced two meters apart in the row. Companion crops–like ampalaya, bell pepper, cabbage, eggplant, kamote, lettuce, peanuts, spring onion, string beans, ube, upland kangkong, etc.–can then be planted in between the wide five-meter space. Companion crops should then be fertilized separately from the coffee trees.

As a general rule, any crop is a candidate for companion crops as long as it does not compete for sunlight and water with the coffee trees. Mid-sized fruit-bearing plants and trees like banana, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, lanzones, papaya and rambutan are shoo-in.

Coffee & Wellness