Agriculture Business Week

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.

“Our coffee farm had suffered from numerous coffee agriculture malpractices in the past 17 years but it is not yet too late to do what is right,” Nueva Ecija says.

“Before I took the course early this year we used to grow the coffee trees as tall as they can be,” claims Nueva Ecija. “For years now our workers have had difficulty harvesting coffee beans since they had to use ladders. Now I know it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Nescafe advises farmers to stump old trees that are uneconomically harvestable to make them “young and productive.” This should be done every six to eight years after the first harvest to rejuvenate the coffee trees. By rejuvenating old coffee trees, they are cut down to a more manageable height.”

To improve the yield of their farm’s traditional Robusta varieties, Nueva Ecija is working on grafting their existing trees with IC2, IC7, IC8 and S274, for Robusta clones that NEDF discovered to be well suited to Philippine climate and growing conditions after years of studies.

NEW GENERATION FARMER
Nueva Ecija is taking the road less traveled by his generation. While most of his peers at Cebu Institute of Technology have opted to work in urban settings, Nueva Ecija has gone back to his hometown to help his father run the coffee farm after graduation.

“Why not? The coffee farm has been very good to us,” says Nueva Ecija. “It has given us our bakery business, two motor vehicles, and provided college education to three of my siblings.”

Nueva Ecija’s father started the coffee farm in 1990 by buying two hectares of sloping farm land from members of the Manobo tribe, who eventually became their farm’s workers. Through the years their coffee farm grew to eight hectares.

Their farm produces an average of 2.5 metric tons green coffee beans(GCB) a year, which they sell to the Nescafe buying station in Maribel. To encourage local coffee production, Nescafe buys at current world market price and offers the best deal in the country with guaranteed payment within 8 working hours after acceptance of delivery. While the world market price usually hovers between P50 and P60 per kilo, this year, it has peaked at P87.

“I know that I made the right choice,” Nueva Ecija stresses. “I see a lot of potential in coffee farming. I learned that if done right, a coffee farm can yield one to tow metric tons of GCB per hectare. That’s more than half of what we produce in our eight-hectare farm.

“I know this entails a lot of work,” adds Nueva Ecija. “But I know that Nescafe will be there to help us.”