I spent yesterday out in the coffee fields picking coffee.
Joel, the guy who owns the rental room where Im staying at the moment (actually its in the back garden of his family home) owns some coffee plants. He is an Israeli who has been living down here for more than ten years and has a Guatemalan wife and several kids. He has a small block of land over near the neighboring village of San Jaun (Almost all the towns are named after assorted Catholic saints here in Central America)
Its about the middle of the dry season here and its getting toward the end of the picking season for coffee. The coffee berries ripen over the dry season and they are picked in four or five passes as they become ripe. So it’s the fourth pass for Joel’s little block of land. We wear work clothes but nothing special. We leave San Pedro on foot at 7:30 am which is a rather late start compared to the local pickers. We walk over to the next village which is only about 3Km away and we meet Jose who is one of Joel’s local friends, and he’s already been picking for half an hour.
The lot is not big (say 30m x 50m) and has a couple of hundred coffee bushes on it. The coffee plants are about 15-20 years old and are about 3m tall though they are quite spindly/flexible bushes rather than small trees or hedge like.
The coffee grows best in dappled shade, so the usual situation is that they are grown in amongst loose plantations of trees – usually Avocado trees. The equipment used in picking is “Spartan” to say the least – You get a bag or a basket with a bit of old rope attached to tie it around your waist…. So equipped I am ready for instruction in the fine art of hand picking Guatemalan Coffee…
Again, this is far more minimal than you might expect –
Work one branch at a time, pull off the red berries and leave the green ones,
When you have finished the branch, move on to the next one,
When you have finished the tree move on to the next one in the row,
When you have finished the row, move on to the next one down the block
…and that’s about it.
OK, so off I go…Three or four hours pass and I have learned some more…
1)Its very dirty work but not very strenuous or difficult.
The dirt is from all the road traffic and the dry season. Dust is unavoidable and it settles on all the coffee plants in quite a thick coating.
2) Some trees are easy to pick and some are difficult.
The easy ones have all ripe berries that are very juicy; they “pop off” easily and can be collected in clusters. The difficult ones have berries that are mixed green/yellow/orange/red which are not very juicy. They have to be individually picked out, and they are quite tenacious and difficult to pull off. I asked why the difference, and it seems that it is mostly due to the shade and water supply. The water supply is what it is – no one irrigates coffee plantations here. The shaded plants ripen more slowly but the resulting berries are far larger juicier, and ripen evenly. The berries from the plants in direct sun are far smaller and not at all juicy. When the coffee plant gets dried out, it stops growing the fruit and tries to ripen it as is. The result is those partially ripe/mixed colour/ hard to pick berries.
We have a very meager meal break of some tortillas and a few little salty sardine like fish and then we go back to work for another three or four hours of picking.
At the end of the session, we have a combined total of about 100Kg of berries which is about three large flour bags in volume (Joel and I picked about 28Kg each and Jose picked about 45Kg).
The bags are tied closed and we each carry one down the road a few hundred meters to a pick up point. This is where the small coffee growers bring their harvest to sell. There is a guy here with a very simple weight balance who pays for the picked coffee by the pound. He in turn transports it to the small coffee processing plants in the town and sells it too them… but that’s another story.
So Joel watches closely as they weigh the coffee and is then paid about 170Q ($25US) for the days work. Of this money he pays Jose 50Q ($7US) which is the standard rate for a coffee picker. Pickers are sometimes paid by the day and sometimes by the pound. When paid by the pound, those easy to pick, big juicy berries are “gold” compared to those measly little dry hard to pick ones! The current price being paid is quite good… If it drops to 70Q per pound (which it does from time to time) then it is no longer viable to grow coffee as a business down here.
Jose then says goodbye and gets a ride with about twenty other pickers in the back of one of the very tatty little pickup trucks that careen along the mountain roads here delivering coffee berries or workers too and from the fields and towns.
Then Joel and I, covered in dust and dirty from berry juice, walk back home along the winding road in the late afternoon. We stop for a small home made “helado” (just a pineapple put through a food processor and poured into small cups and frozen with a bit of stick as a handle) at a tienda in San Juan before we walk back to San Pedro.
And that’s coffee picking!
As I said, its not that hard but it is a long and dirty day and it doesn’t pay much…
I think I’ll need to find a different way to earn some money down here!
So, The next time you lot in Vancouver (Sak et al...) are sucking back a brew from Starbucks, just think that what you paid for your single drink, is the same as the daily income for a whole Guatemalan family!
