Coffee Firm’s Programs Help Orani Farmers
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.
History can back up Mangalindan’s claims. After World War II, coffee farming started to take off in Orani, making Bataan one of the top coffee-producing provinces in the country.
THIRD GENERATION COFFEE FARMER.
Unfortunately, the sudden proliferation of coffee farms also resulted in the overproduction of GCB in those early years.
“We saw many sacks of beans turn rotten,” reveals Mangalindan, a third-generation coffee farmer. She says her grandfather used to run about 100 hectares of
coffee farmland which sent her and her siblings to school.
Like what happened to other coffee-producing provinces, many farmers in Orani switched to other crops after than slump. Things began to turn around, however, when Nescafe introduced its direct procurement program in the mid-’80s in their area. This enabled the farmers to sell GCB from as little as one kilo at any of Nestle’s buying stations across the country at prevailing world market prices.
“We get utmost transparency with Nescafe and are assured of payment within eight hours upon delivery,” says’ Mangalindan.
STARTING HER OWN COFFEE FARM.
Mangalindan says that the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1981 created another setback for coffee farmers in Orani.
“After the massive ash fall, many of our coffee trees ended up dying,” tells Mangalindan. “We were not able to perform any cutting; and the new environment was just very hot for coffee.”
It was not until five years later that Orani farmers were able to plant coffee again.
Mangalindan started her own coffee farm in 2000, coming back from her stint in the United States. She wanted to start it right so she sourced out her planting materials from the Nestle Experimental and Demonstration Farm (NEDF) in Tagum City. She chose to intercrop her Robusta trees with pineapples, bananas, and then black pepper. Mangalindan prefers black pepper because it naturally clings to kakawati which promotes the proliferation of earthworms.
PRIVATE HELP.
Mangalindan says that Nestle agronomists have been actively helping them address the issues that limit their yield and productivity.
“We harvest our green coffee beans around December and given that we are in the mountainous area, it’s so hard for us to dry the beans properly,” she says. “With the help of Nestle agronomists, we will soon install the necessary drying equipment in order to meet the moisture requirements set during coffee buying.”
A TRUE PARTNERSHIP.
Like Mangalindan and many of the Orani farmers, Nescafe has helped the livelihood of 30,000 farmers and their families nationwide since 1961.
“As what I have been telling others, we have our farm, we have our coffee, and now we have Nescafe so we don’t have to worry,” she concludes.
Popularity: 4%
Popularity: 4%
