E-Cafe members and Buena Vista producers had a field trip day to E-Café’s new finca, Las Chicharras.
(Part of Las Chicharras)
The purpose of Las Chicharras is to have a stable source of coffee and research and development.
E-Café has been running Las Chicharras since February this year. As soon as E-Café took charge, we have been working to fill up the empty lands with coffee. We also have started maintenance of the coffee farm such as pruning the shade trees. Because we have access to abundance of information.
(Producer listening to Cristian. Coffee is planted)
To share what we have gained so far from Las Chicharras, we invited producers from Buena Vista and Pena Bermeja to Las Chicharras.
(Delmar talking to the producers)
Our Las Chicharras director, Delmar, showed the producers about how we are running the finca.
Few of the highlights for this visit are soil fertility, popular varietal, and pesticide.
The problem for most producers is that they do not have enough money to maintain their coffee farms. They are not able to buy fertilizer, pesticide. Even if they want to, they have no previous experience so they do not know what to buy and how to apply. How we They also choose varietals with the most yield regardless of the taste.
(Preparing the fertilizer with 1/3 of fermented coffee cherry pulp and 2/3 of soil)
(The root of the plant is dipped into this liquid to prevent from rotting)
(All the plants are separated by varietals)
After looking around the finca, we had a Q&A session with a local pesticide and fertilizer salesman because the producers requested it. They have not used fertilizer and/or pesticide before so they wanted to know more about it.
We finished the day with a lunch at a restaurant after coming down from the finca.
(Producers eating at a restaurant)