Agriculture Business Week

Unlike other coffee farmers Jolan Lamoste painstakingly sorts sacks of first pick green coffee beans (GCB) for defects before selling them to Nestlé, the makers of Nescafe. Lamoste has a good reputation to protect – his father was a longtime supplier of Nestlé. He not only inherited his parents’ livelihood but also their sense of pride in delivering the best produce their lands can yield.

Lamoste, who hails from Laac, Compostela Valley, inherited the coffee growing business from his parents, Maximo and Gina. His parents, in fact, were given the honor of becoming ceremonial coffee farmer ambassadors in 2006, when the Nestlé Satellite Buying Station in Davao City celebrated its 20th anniversary.

After 20 years of coffee farming and trading, Lamoste knows there is no shortcut to good, quality coffee. He always resists the temptation to quickly sell his dried and dehulled first harvest coffee to Nestlé Satellite Buying Station in San Francisco, Agusan del Sur.

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Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap sees a bright future for coffee farming in the Philippines—despite the setbacks of the past two decades–and has set his sights on reviving the coffee industry.

Yap, who is actively working with farmers and private organizations to improve the quality and quantity of yields in all sectors of agriculture, believes that reviving the coffee industry will bring many advantages to the entire country.

From 1989 to 2002, the Philippine coffee industry suffered a huge drop in production. From a global coffee exporter during the ’70s and ’80s, producing more than 70,000 tons of coffee (about half of that amount for export), the Philippines has become an importer of coffee. Local production hit rock-bottom in 1989-2002, when only 23,000 tons were being produced annually.

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A two-year old coffee tree nursery is set to share Nescafe technology to farmers in Sultan Kudarat, the leading coffee producing province in the country.

D and R Farms, owned by Dr. Dante Eugenio and managed by Edgar Eugenio, is scheduled to harvest some 200,000 rooted cuttings of Robusta coffee from which Nescafe, the country’s leading instant coffee brand is made. Edgar, a retired pharmaceutical executive is a graduate of coffee specialist course at the Nestle Experimental and Demonstration Farm (NEDF) in Tagum, Davao del Norte.

“We are excited about the renewed interest of farmers in coffee,” Says Edgar. “In Kalamansig alone, our starting order last year was for 50,000 seedlings.”

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What is one of the world’s most popular drinks? Coffee. In the Philippines, 8 out of 10 adults drink an average of 2.5 cups of coffee every day.

The popular drink comes from an evergreen tree, which was first discovered in Ethiopia, where its red, cherry-like berries (generally containing 2 seeds per berry) were used for wine and food before A.D. 1000. Its beans are first ground and roasted and made into a drink during the 15th century in the Arabian Peninsula. Coffee later spread throughout Europe since the 17th century.

“In the Philippines, coffee has a history as rich as its flavor,” says the National Coffee Development Board (NCDB), whose main objective is to develop and promote the Philippine coffee industry through technical assistance and credit programs for coffee farms and through marketing and promotions of coffee for domestic and export markets.

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An ex-salesman lets us in on the advantages and disadvantages of sharing entrepreneurial endeavors with your kin.

For more than 19 years now, Eugene O. Cebuala, general manager of Kiks Roasted Corn Coffee, has been an avid coffee drinker. “It’s as if my day’s incomplete without at least a cup of coffee. While I often get hyper acidic because of it, and the doctor has advised me to stay away from my favorite brew, I still can’t help myself,” he said.

And so, after a visit last year in Butuan where he saw his first encounter with a different kind of coffee-not from beans, but from corn-he also caught sight of promising agribusiness. After talking to the processor of the product and ironing out the rest of the details, Kiks was born.

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Coffee produced from the Philippines’ northern highlands will soon be sold around the world by a Canadian company, local officials said.

An agreement between Canada’s Rocky Mountain Café and the Kibungan, Benguet local government are set to be signed next week, helping the company increase its production by purchasing coffee grown by resident farmers.

Kibungan, also known for growing varieties of red and white rice, produces four tons of coffee per year, town mayor Benito Siadto said.

Produce is harvested from 2,700 coffee trees in a 20-hectare area.

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After more than ten years of working as a chemist abroad, Gina Mangalindan returned to her roots – coffee farming. Starting with her three-hectare mountainous land in Brgy. Tala, Orani, Bataan. Mangalindan hopes to revive coffee production in her province one farm at a time.

“Orani’s landscape is very conducive to planting coffee,” says Mangalindan who has been supplying Nescafe with green coffee beans (GCB) for a decade now and has likewise adopted practices from many of the company’s coffee farming programs.

She adds that like the Cordilleras, her barangay gets a steady supply of mountain spring water courtesy of micro waterfalls in the area.

“If Cavite has Taal Lake that brings the cool breeze, we have the South China Sea. On top of that, we are in the buffer zone of Bataan National Park so we are assured of protection for whatever we plant here,” Mangalindan stresses.

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As part of its efforts to support the coffee farmers, the rural communities and the local coffee industry, Nescafe, Nestle’s heritage coffee brand, extends its support to Bukidnon farmers by gifting them with superior coffee planting materials and free training and assistance on coffee growing.

The handover was made during the closing ceremony of the province’s annual Kaamulan Festival led by no less than Sen. Loren Legarda, Gov. Jose Ma Zubiri Jr. and Nestle Philippines’ senior vice president for corporate affairs Edith de Leon. Also present were the leaders from the seven tribes of Bukidnon, namely the Higaonon, the Manobo, the Matigsalug, Talaandig, the Tigwahonon and the Umayamnon.

The Kaamulan Festival, famous for being the country’s only tribal harvest festival, attracts more than 200,000 people from various parts of Mindanao.

Included in the package presented are coffee pulpers, coffee seeds and polybags for seedling production.

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Raising children and sending then to school is three times harder for a single mom like Sarah Concepcion Dabucun. Facing the pangs and hardships of parenthood alone, she needs to exert more effort to make a living and invest in her kids future.

After finishing Bachelor of Science in Agriculture degree at the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) in Batac, Ilocos Norte in 1995, Sarah hoped to work as an employee. However, she went back to Ilocos Norte and became a rice farmer instead. After several years of being a rice farmer, however, her family’s life did not improve much.

As the prices of commodities continuously rose, Sarah decided to go into peanut butter production to add value to her harvest. However, this business venture did not prosper due to stiff competition among the commercial brands. But Sarah did not lose hope. Armed with determination and love for her children, she was willing to try another business.

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A jack-of-all-trades tells us why the internet is as important as having a good product.

Nobody’s ever told Larrimar Tia that he does so much for a 35-year old: he’s a graphic artist, a software architect, an IT. consultant, one of the country’s pioneers in Web development, an author and a poet with his works published in his own website larrimar.com, and presently Chief Innovation Officer of LVEWORLD Corporation, a start-up company responsible for one of the first 8-in-1 herbal coffee products in the Philippines.

He sad, “After working in a Hong Kong firm as a web developer, I wanted to do something different. After all, I had been in the IT industry for over 15 years and I’ve always wanted to have my own company. Actually I started as a freelance consultant, then I formed my own corporation which is apart from the consulting business that I am involved right now.”

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A coffee company’s ongoing soil and water conservation programs in coffee farms throughout the Philippines are proving to be beneficial during the dry months.

Joel Lumagbas, head of the agricultural services department of Nestle Philippines, Inc. (NPI), says the company is promoting soil and water conservation programs in coffee farms in various ways through the company’s Coffee Based Sustainable Farming System (CBSFS} under the worldwide drive of Sustainable Agriculture Initiative of Nestle (SAIN).

One method uses Jatropha curcas, known locally as tuba-tuba. Aside from being a source of glycerol and biodiesel, Jatropha curcas is one of the secondary crops that CBSFS has been promoting to provide additional income for farmers and to prevent soil erosion.

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The famous strong Batangas coffee gets a new kick. Thanks to the efforts of retired Col Nicetas “Kati” Katigbak.

Aside from the famed “balisong,” the province of Batangas has always been identified with coffee. Barako coffee in particular has been part of our culture and is the benchmark used for other local coffees. It is then surprising to know that the top producer of Liberica coffee better known as the barako is not Batangas but rather its neighboring province of Cavite.

It was this desire to reclaim the provinces’ culture and pride that urged retired Col. Nicetas “Kati” Katigbak to embark on a campaign to regain Batangas’s place as the Barako capital of the country. Katigbak, who comes from a long line of coffee farmers, said that he remembered when he was young that there were a lot of Barako trees in the area. He said that during the Spanish colonial era, Lipa was the country’s coffee capital and the 4th largest coffee producer in the world. The coffee rust struck sometime in the 18oos and nearly wiped out the entire industry allowing countries like Brazil to overtake the country. After that famed coffee debacle, the farmers were able to rebuild the industry. It was during that time that Katigbak remembered his childhood and the invigorating smell of barako coffee on cool mornings.
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We often think that illness brings nothing but problems and discomforts. Sometimes, the conditions that it caused lead its to healthier diet and promising agribusiness.

This is exactly what happened to Alicia S. Paglinawan, general manager and producer of Sunrise Roasted Corn Coffee from Maygatasan, Bayugan, Agusan del Sur. She said that she was frequently consulting her doctor because she was sickly and always experiencing constipation, nervousness and other discomforts.

Her mother advised her to drink something fibrous and lessen her caffeine intake. Considering her suggestion, Alicia and her husband Ernesto started producing for personal consumption only corn coffee, a fibrous and caffeine-free beverage.
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Armed with competent training on coffee farming through the help of leading coffee brand Nescafe, 26-year old Donald Nueva Ecija from Sultan Kudarat hopes to revive the family’s not-so-productive coffee farm.

An industrial engineering graduate, Nueva Ecija plans to apply what he learned from his free three-day coffee specialist course at the Nestle Experimental and Development Farm(NEDF) in their farm in Liba, Sultan Kudarat.

The young coffee farmer is confident and optimistic that through proper coffee planting, cultivation, harvesting and processing techniques that he learned from NEDF, he would be able to increase their annual coffee production.

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