It’s time again for me to say good bye to another WWOOF farm. I’ve been at Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza for a month now and there is still so much more of Brazil that I want to see. I came to FAF to learn about organic coffee, but I’m leaving right at the beginning of the coffee season (which is from June-September). Unfortunately, this means that I won’t be able to see how coffee is processed on the farm. However, I participated in the farm’s coffee harvest, I was able to tour many local coffee farms, I got to meet international coffee buyers and I got to taste a lot of coffee!
I also got to participate in a handful of other activities at FAF unrelated to coffee.
As a favor to the owners I made a little video titled “A Day in the Life of a WWOOFer at FAF.” Check it out:
The food I ate at the farm was always delicious. Nearly all the ingredients were organic and fresh from the garden, and we had an amazing cook, Rosangela, who makes anything taste good. My first week on the farm I was her number one dish washer. I knew too little Portuguese to speak to her and her chef focus and attitude kind of scared me! By the second week she had warmed up to me, and by the last week she was finally divulging some of her recipes!
My two absolute favorite recipes of hers were her chicken pie (Torta de Frango) and her bread in a minute (Pão de Minuto). I had to watch her every move to try and get an exact recipe, but it’s essentially impossible, she never cooks to a recipe! The torta de frango is basically an ingredient list with some instructions to follow. Sorry, I tried my best! She just said add as much of each ingredient as you like. Ha! Good luck.
frango=chicken=pollo=mmmmmmmm!
Torta de Frango
Chicken breast
Onion
Green or red bell pepper
Chopped tomatoes
Tomato sauce
Chopped olives
Crushed red pepper, black pepper, salt
1 cup of cream
Batter: 3 eggs, 3 cups milk, ¾ cup oil, 12 TB flour, 1 TB baking powder and salt to taste.
Boil and shred chicken.
Sauté onion with bell peppers and then add chopped tomatoes. Once tomatoes start to soften add chicken and tomato sauce. Cook and stir. Condiment with olives salt and peppers. Lastly add cup of cream and stir to combine.
In a blender mix eggs, milk and oil. Add the 12 tablespoons of flour, a little at a time, 1 tablespoon of baking powder and salt to taste. Blend well.
Pour half the batter into a large oiled oven proof dish. Dump the chicken mixture in and cover with the remaining batter.
Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until golden brown.
Pão=bread=pan
Pão de Minuto
3 eggs and 1 egg yolk
1/4 cup oil
2 tablespoons butter
Salt to taste
Flour, quantity required
2 tablespoons baking powder
In a large bowl, crack 3 eggs and add oil, butter and salt. Mix with a wooden spoon.
Start adding flour little by little, combining well each time and mixing in the baking powder as well. Add enough flour to make a nice soft dough.
Rip off hunks of dough about the size of oranges and roll into a sausage. Slap the sausage down onto a flat work surface and flatten a little with your fingers. Roll forward twice and backward once quickly to form spiral buns.
Lay spirals onto a buttered and floured baking sheet about 2 inches apart from each other and paint with an egg yolk.
Bake until golden and eat right out of the oven! I loved having it in the morning with honey and cheese.
The coffee harvest in Brazil ranges roughly from June-September. At Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza we began to harvest coffee at the end of May. For a week I went out to harvest coffee almost every day. We harvested the shade grown coffee one day and every other day we went out to harvest the organic sun coffee, which there is much more of. Most of us coffee drinkers don’t ever get the opportunity to be coffee pickers, let alone meet coffee pickers. I have gotten to do both. Here’s what it’s like:
SCHEDULE
You leave for work at 7am. At 10am you have a one hour break for lunch. Then at 2 you have a half hour coffee break (yes you drink coffee!). The entire rest of the time you are picking, and at FAF that means you are selecting only the dark, dried up cherries.
THE WORK
Take a big white tarp and spread it out underneath the tree, let all the cherries you are picking fall in to the tarp. Leaves and twigs will fall in too. Once your tarp is full and heavy, pick out all the leaves, twigs and green cherries that may have fallen in and deposit your coffee cherries into a sack. This is not difficult work, it’s just tedious; being a picker requires a lot of patience. You are also out in the sun all day, which is a pain. I only picked for a week and was going a little crazy by the end of it, these guys do this every day until the harvest is over!
Cuando se cosecha café todo cae sobre una lona grande que llevás de árbol en árbol.
Los chicos separando las hojas, cerezas verdes y palitos que caen con el buen café cosechado.
THE PICKERS
I worked with a group of 8 other coffee pickers. 2 women and 6 men. Two were in their 50s, two were in their late twenties and 4 were under 20 years old. Then there was me. Quite a mix! Nearly all were married, including the ones under 20!
THE FUN PART
The best part of picking coffee is that you are in close proximity to everyone and can easily chat. I got up to speed on all the local gossip this way! Someone always either has an mp3 blasting the latest top 20 or they are singing for you. Brazilians are not shy to sing or dance, which is quite enjoyable for the rest of us.
THE BENEFITS
The coffee pickers at FAF are probably some of the best treated coffee pickers in the world. Their wages are way higher than the world average for coffee pickers. They can grow and harvest anything they like from the farm and all receive milk from the dairy. They also have the choice to live on the farm rent-free. The farm has 50 houses that all used to be occupied by employees during the early coffee boom. Now many have been remodeled and are very nice. I lived in one! Only about half of the employees at FAF live on the farm. I think the other half just don’t want to be so close to their work. None of them were particularly passionate about coffee; they were all moderately satisfied with their work and didn’t have any major complaints.
PROCESSING COFFEE CHERRIES
When we’d come back from the field we would always toss our coffee cherries out on to suspended drying racks. Unfortunately, I only have a basic understanding of how that coffee will be processed next. I wish I had gotten to see the processing that follows, but I would probably have had to stay another month on the farm at least.
I know that there are two different processes, a wet process and a dry process. The coffee that we picked on the farm is dry processed. Every day for up to 4 weeks that coffee will be turned several times to ensure even sun drying. Then the dark, dried up fruit and skin will be hulled off the bean in a large mill (one of the two machines I got to clean). It will then be sorted and some will stay on the farm to be roasted while the majority will be sold as green beans, this year probably to Scandinavian coffee buyers.
The wet process I know even less about, though I also spent a few days scrubbing the machine used to wet process coffee on the farm. I know that it requires quite a lot of water to soak all the coffee cherries in. The bad and green beans will float, while the ripe beans will sink. Then the fruit is mechanically removed and the beans are dried in the sun. Once the beans are dry, the parchment layer that is left is hulled before selling.
Depositando café sobre un tejerón suspenso para secar al sol.
El tejerón principal donde se seca el café en FAF. A la distancia se puede ver la máquina blanca que lava cerezas frescas de café.
Coffee is not a simple crop; there are so many different aspects to it. It takes years to study and understand the coffee market, its history, coffee’s optimal growing conditions, how to best process coffee and how to cup coffee. Most people who drink coffee every day know very little about it and only see it as a cheap energy drink. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, I just think that coffee is much more special. If we appreciate coffee as more of a specialty food, if we try to seek out the best quality possible and cherish the time we take out of our day to sip our hot, black brew, I think it can become a much more beautiful drink.
Café bajo sombra casi no existe en Brasil, pero en esta granja es un nuevo experimento.
The most impressive and progressive project at Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza is their shade grown coffee. You have probably heard of shade grown coffee, the term has become synonymous with bird friendly coffee, but here in Brazil it is unheard of. FAF is probably one of very few coffee farms in all of Brazil that purposefully plants coffee in a forest. Of course, when I say forest I don’t mean a dense jungle, coffee plants definitely still need plenty of sunlight to grow and for their cherries to ripen, but some shade actually provides many benefits.
In Brazil, you mostly see conventional, sun-grown coffee: rows and rows of deep green bushes growing on bare dirt or dead grass. This coffee is boosted with fertilizer, protected with pesticides and sprayed with herbicides to make it easier to harvest around. It is harvested by machine: either a hand held device that looks like a motorized rake is pushed up in to the bush, or a large tractor drives over the entire plant. This style of production is incredibly energy intensive, contaminating, and damaging, but it sure does yield vast amounts of coffee, which is clearly the only thing the growers are after.
Now-a-days some sun grown coffee is becoming organic. The shift is quite difficult; farms lose lots of money when they do this, but they can then charge a premium for their product, instead of selling conventional. Organic coffee usually has green grasses and plants growing all around it. There are always lots of spiders, ants, wasps and other insects living in the fields. I also saw some folks growing corn, cassava, avocados, papayas and bananas in between their rows of coffee bushes, to help sustain their families.
However, of all the coffee farms I’ve seen, the coffee with the most wildlife is by far the shade grown coffee at FAF. First of all, the place is gorgeous. You are surrounded by greenery, sun streams through cracks in the canopy, birds call and sing amongst each other constantly, butterflies, spiders and ants creep and flutter past you. I even saw a monkey swing silently through the vines of the taller canopy trees. This was the first coffee I got to pick, and it was by far the most enjoyable.
João, nuestro jefe, cosechando café bajo sombra. Es muy lindo poder cosechar café fuera del sol fuerte del día.
Shade-grown coffee is actually an official certification. There are several characteristics that are measured in order to achieve the certification.
There must be trees of different heights
There must be a diversity of tree species
There must be enough mulching on the ground from fallen organic matter
The optimum shade cover is 40%
It is also important to protect waterways
Observing all of these guidelines is difficult and the certification process is complicated, so instead, Marcos and Sylvia call their coffee “nature friendly,” which I think suits it perfectly well.
Encontré un nido en una planta de café! Café bajo sombra sirve como un refugio para animales silvestres, especialmente pájaros.
While shade-grown coffee does not yield as much as conventional coffee, it has many benefits:
The area becomes a wildlife refuge, which is immensely important in this part of Brazil where there are so many endangered species due to the disappearance of Mata Atlantica forests.
The coffee ripens more slowly on the bush, meaning the sugars have time to absorb into the bean, supposedly increasing flavor.
Shade coffee is resilient to climate conditions. The soil retains much more moisture and the temperature is more consistent. A couple years ago when many coffee plantations were devastated by drought, the shade-grown coffee plants at FAF remained unharmed and were the highest producers.
Requires very little upkeep
The shade-grown coffee at FAF was actually an accident! Marcos and Sylvia were trying to reforest this part of the farm, so they just left it untouched. Then one day as they were taking a hike through the forest they noticed that many small coffee plants were growing all on their own. They were the great grandchildren of the coffee that used to cover the entire farm, and they were growing strong and healthy without any pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. The forest balances out all of their needs: the shade prevents weeds from growing, there are good pests to fight the problematic ones, and the soil is the richest and healthiest on the entire farm from all the organic matter that falls and decomposes on it.
So Marcos and Sylvia are now planting more coffee in the forest. Every now and then they may cut down a tree to provide the plants a little bit more sun light, but apart from that the only time they need to work there is during the harvest. Marcos calls it his “passive organic” coffee, as opposed to his “active organic” sun-grown coffee that requires much more upkeep.
Also, the fact that the coffee is hand-picked increases its quality. In Brazil labor has become very expensive, so few plantations hand-pick their cherries. When we harvested coffee we selected the most flavorful beans, those that were past ripe and looked like raisins. I can’t say what this year’s batch is going to taste like, but Marcos’s son, the international coffee cupper, gave last year’s crop a very high score.
It was hard to capture the beauty of the shade grown coffee, but I made a quick video for you all to see a little of what it’s like:
