History of a coffee revolution.
In the early 1980's there were few roads to get up into the mountains of San Luis where they grew their coffee. In November, people from town would pack up their things and pay one of the few trucks in town to move their family to the mountain where they would live in rustic shacks during the coffee harvest lasting from early December until late February. Schools took their vacations for these months. The only varieties of coffee were the old arabica varieties and burbon growing in close to natural forest environments.
In those same years my wife Joni and I were searching for a way to do service work in another country. We ended up going to Honduras in 1984 and chose to live in the town of San Luis in the department of Comayagua. I wanted to do agricultural development work with farmers and my wife wanted to use her experience as a nurse to work in health.
At that time the farming activities in the area were more diversified than they are today. They had coffee farms growing in what was pretty much natural forest environments up in the highest parts of the mountains. Everywhere else they were practicing slash and burn migratory farming to grow corn, beans and rice. Some also cultivated sugar cane and had oxen driven mills to press out the cane juice and then boil it down to make sugar. For the most part, even though the bulk of their work was planting corn and beans at that time, production was very low because of the infertility of the soils grown on steep land with very little top soil that had once been pine forest.
Much of that diversity is gone now. Although the farmers continue to produce some corn and beans, they no longer are growing rice and rare is the farmer that produces sugar. The rice mill in town broke down and was never repaired. The rice they eat now is imported from China. The last farmer I knew to produce sugar stopped after his oxen were stolen for the second time. They now all eat refined sugar that comes from huge sugar mills. The people say the rice from China tastes better and the refined sugar is better in their coffee.
When Honduras was used as a base for military support to the Contras to battle the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, US AID money flooded the country. This money primarily came in the form of loans creating an enormous international debt for Honduras for the first time in their history (from what I understand). By far the most significant AID project was the El Cajon hydro-electri dam to produce electricity to sell to other countries in Central America. The intended market was Nicaragua, but with relations with Nicaragua broken down, Honduras had to find other ways to pay its international debt. It needed a way to bring dollars into the country, and AID turned to financing coffee production.
Little did I understand what was coming when an agronomist from the government came into the San Luis area asking where Tierra Nueva had its best agricultual committees formed practicing soil conservation and using other sustainable practices.
AID started in the San Luis area by working with two Tierra Nueva groups -- one in the village of Zacatales and the other in Pocitos. They started by helping them plant "viveros" (nurseries) introducing new varieties -- Caturra and Paca. Tierra Nueva continued to work with the groups teaching them to plant coffee in contours, experimenting with using terraces, composting, and growing the coffee in shade. We were fortunate to have Aguinaldo Sauceda working with us who came from Guinope where he had years of experience working on a coffee farm. The group in Pocitos even required that to be a part of the AID group and get coffee plants, each farmer had to plant a plot with Tierra Nueva using soil conservation.
What I didn't see coming was how fast the coffee program was about to spread. More AID money came pouring in with loans to plant more viveros and buy chainsaws to clear the land for planting coffee. The mountains that once were filled with the sounds of birds and the occasional chopping of a machete were soon whirring with the noise of chainsaws and the air filled with the smoke of burning forest. Coffee plants were put in the ground as quickly as possible to be grown in full sun on steep slopes with no protection from soil erosion. Loans were made easy to get to load the soil with urea and other chemical fertilizers. In a matter of a few years, every old growth tree had been fallen (there remains a two acre patch today in an area encompassing over 30 villages and many thousands of acres), and virtually every farmer in every village was in debt.
Today the San Luis area produces a lot of coffee and not too much of anything else. During this whole time of transition into coffee production, Tierra Nueva worked to encourage farmers to stay somewhat diversified by setting aside land for food production, grow their coffee in diversified shade systems, use manures and compost whenever possible, use soil conservation methods such as chopping weeds with machetes and not using hoes, pay workers fairly, and always plant on a contour to keep traffic through the farm across the contours and not up and down. Because we had worked hard to teach farmers to increase yields of corn and beans, farmers do not need as much land as they did before to produce the food their families need.
Fortunately, farmers learned pretty quickly that growing coffee in full sun is costly. It requires several weedings a year and intensive applications of nitrogen fertilizer. As a result, now all of the coffee in the area is shade grown. The real work now is to improve the quality of the coffee, and that's another chapter to this story.
In those same years my wife Joni and I were searching for a way to do service work in another country. We ended up going to Honduras in 1984 and chose to live in the town of San Luis in the department of Comayagua. I wanted to do agricultural development work with farmers and my wife wanted to use her experience as a nurse to work in health.
At that time the farming activities in the area were more diversified than they are today. They had coffee farms growing in what was pretty much natural forest environments up in the highest parts of the mountains. Everywhere else they were practicing slash and burn migratory farming to grow corn, beans and rice. Some also cultivated sugar cane and had oxen driven mills to press out the cane juice and then boil it down to make sugar. For the most part, even though the bulk of their work was planting corn and beans at that time, production was very low because of the infertility of the soils grown on steep land with very little top soil that had once been pine forest.
Much of that diversity is gone now. Although the farmers continue to produce some corn and beans, they no longer are growing rice and rare is the farmer that produces sugar. The rice mill in town broke down and was never repaired. The rice they eat now is imported from China. The last farmer I knew to produce sugar stopped after his oxen were stolen for the second time. They now all eat refined sugar that comes from huge sugar mills. The people say the rice from China tastes better and the refined sugar is better in their coffee.
When Honduras was used as a base for military support to the Contras to battle the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, US AID money flooded the country. This money primarily came in the form of loans creating an enormous international debt for Honduras for the first time in their history (from what I understand). By far the most significant AID project was the El Cajon hydro-electri dam to produce electricity to sell to other countries in Central America. The intended market was Nicaragua, but with relations with Nicaragua broken down, Honduras had to find other ways to pay its international debt. It needed a way to bring dollars into the country, and AID turned to financing coffee production.
Little did I understand what was coming when an agronomist from the government came into the San Luis area asking where Tierra Nueva had its best agricultual committees formed practicing soil conservation and using other sustainable practices.
AID started in the San Luis area by working with two Tierra Nueva groups -- one in the village of Zacatales and the other in Pocitos. They started by helping them plant "viveros" (nurseries) introducing new varieties -- Caturra and Paca. Tierra Nueva continued to work with the groups teaching them to plant coffee in contours, experimenting with using terraces, composting, and growing the coffee in shade. We were fortunate to have Aguinaldo Sauceda working with us who came from Guinope where he had years of experience working on a coffee farm. The group in Pocitos even required that to be a part of the AID group and get coffee plants, each farmer had to plant a plot with Tierra Nueva using soil conservation.
What I didn't see coming was how fast the coffee program was about to spread. More AID money came pouring in with loans to plant more viveros and buy chainsaws to clear the land for planting coffee. The mountains that once were filled with the sounds of birds and the occasional chopping of a machete were soon whirring with the noise of chainsaws and the air filled with the smoke of burning forest. Coffee plants were put in the ground as quickly as possible to be grown in full sun on steep slopes with no protection from soil erosion. Loans were made easy to get to load the soil with urea and other chemical fertilizers. In a matter of a few years, every old growth tree had been fallen (there remains a two acre patch today in an area encompassing over 30 villages and many thousands of acres), and virtually every farmer in every village was in debt.
Today the San Luis area produces a lot of coffee and not too much of anything else. During this whole time of transition into coffee production, Tierra Nueva worked to encourage farmers to stay somewhat diversified by setting aside land for food production, grow their coffee in diversified shade systems, use manures and compost whenever possible, use soil conservation methods such as chopping weeds with machetes and not using hoes, pay workers fairly, and always plant on a contour to keep traffic through the farm across the contours and not up and down. Because we had worked hard to teach farmers to increase yields of corn and beans, farmers do not need as much land as they did before to produce the food their families need.
Fortunately, farmers learned pretty quickly that growing coffee in full sun is costly. It requires several weedings a year and intensive applications of nitrogen fertilizer. As a result, now all of the coffee in the area is shade grown. The real work now is to improve the quality of the coffee, and that's another chapter to this story.
