A11

Kevin Steen

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It's Thanksgiving, and our region is enjoying harvest. Pumpkins are piled outside your grocer's door, and the roadside vegetable stands are bursting with produce.

The harvest represents people's hard work throughout the year. My mother says that whole families helped with the potato harvest where she grew up in rural PEI. In generations prior, it wasn't uncommon to shut down schools for two or three weeks while potatoes were brought in.

But nothing could be more labour-intensive than the coffee harvest. Jon Thorn, in his book, The Coffee Companion, says harvesting represents 50 per cent of a producer's annual costs. Most often, coffee is picked by hand because of the uneven terrain and high altitudes upon which it is grown.

Growers need to pay attention and capture the harvest at just the right time. Here at home, in our region's vineyards, animals like raccoons, birds and even bears know instinctively when grapes are ripe. Producers must keep watch so that animals don't consume in a few hours the crop they have taken months to nurture.

Likewise, coffee farmers in Jamaica know it's time to harvest the coffee cherry when large numbers of bats descend on the bushes at night to suck at the ripe fruit.

When the cherries are ready, the worker drops only the best and most mature into his basket. On average a worker picks 110-220 pounds (50-100 kg) of cherries per day. The coffee bean represents only about 20 per cent of that weight. This process is repeated over the next eight to 10 days until each worker has filled a 100-130 pound (45-60 kg) bag of beans.

In some larger plantations, machine stripping completes the harvest in one day. This reduces labour costs (and employment), and captures both ripe and unripe fruit.

In countries north of the equator (like Central America) coffee is harvested between September and December. In regions south of the equator, harvest occurs between April and May. Equatorial countries harvest all year round, depending on the altitudes of their crops.

The bulk of today's production lay in South and Central America, particularly Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador. This region supplies 70 per cent of the world's coffee.

So while you take your coffee and dessert after your turkey dinner this weekend, take some time to remember the coffee harvesters all around the world who also labour hard to build a future for themselves and their families.

* Kevin Steen is a true coffee lover and proprietor of Damascus Coffee House in Riverview. Do you have a coffee question for Kevin? Visit him at the shop, or call him at 855-4646.