So it's day 13 and I am just now posting the blog I was supposed to start a week ago. Things have been hectic and the first few days were total locura (craziness in Portuguese), but now I am settled in, improving my Portuguese skills, and really starting to appreciate this country. If there's one thing that has been nothing short of amazing from the start, it's my internship.
I am working with Agroecology Professor Ricardo Santos and about twenty graduate students, doing a combination of research experiments at the University and extension work with farmers, all about COFFEE. I have limited experience with coffee production in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Colombia, and I drink multiple cups each day as a student at University of Illinois. However, I can already tell that my experience here, in Brazil, will cause me to never look at a cup of coffee the same.
My first Saturday here I went with an economics student to observe a small scale roasting observation. We left at 5:30 AM and I watched the sun rise over the mountainous coffee fields as our little car flew up and down and around the rugged roads. After our three hour journey we arrived in the small farming town.
The roasting room was at the back of a combination house/market. I was introduced to "the Roaster," who has been roasting coffee for local farmers for almost twenty years. I was one of the first Americans he had talked to so I was forced to use my Portuñol (Spanish + Portuguese). He brought out hot coffee and breakfast treats including local bananas.
The roasting began! For three hours we roasted the raw dried white beans, about 60 lbs in total. Of course it's the rest of the world so they used kilograms! I realized that I was wearing my Brother Bear's Coffee shirt and drinking the same coffee we were watching being roasted. This incredible experience is just one part of the work I will do over the summer- I can't wait to roast more coffee!
There is just too much to include in one post here about my first Saturday in Brazil. I'll talk about our afternoon visit to the mountaintop coffee fields in my next post. So to conclude this post, I will briefly explain what our research is about and why it's so important.
Our team of agronomists, ecologists and economists are all working to help local small coffee farmers. Small means less than 40 acres. Typically the coffee from the region where I am working is exported. For a small farmer this means that they will make a very small portion of the profit, compared to say, what the coffee shop in the US makes. Right now the better coffee is exported and the inferior coffee is sent to the local market. We want to change this. We want farmers to grow even better coffee and for that coffee to be sold locally to Brazilians so the farmer makes the money they deserve and it doesn't take forever. So this is why it take agronomists, sociologists, economists, and ecologists- to reform and improve the process from the time the coffee tree is planted all the way to the moment it reaches the consumer's mug. I'll conclude my first post by saying that I have realized how important it is that we actually care about a connection to the farmers that grow our coffee. Yes, buying Fair Trade helps, but it's much greater than that, and I still have much to learn about how complex coffee really is. Stay tuned!!!
