Barista Magazine

AUG-SEP 2013

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DOMINIC A N RE PU BL I C YOU HAVE TO START WHERE YOU ARE. If you want to start farming coffee, let me tell you the three things I tell everyone. First, I don't recommend it to friends. (I'm looking you in the eye.) Second, what do you call a hole in the ground you throw money into? (Answer: a four-letter f word that ends in m.) Third, there are only two good days when you have a farm: the day you buy it and the day you sell it. (Truth be told, I want you to buy a farm. I just don't want to paint the same romantic picture that you have already painted. Farming is hard, and the owner has little control.) I purchased my coffee farm in the Dominican Republic about six years ago. Since then I've made every mistake in the book. I started where I was: a returned Peace Corps volunteer who knew a bit about coffee farming, a lot about the local community, and my Dominican Spanish was pretty great. I didn't know squat. When the prior owner told me how much it cost to clean the farm (i.e. remove weeds), he quoted me a small number. "How many times a year do you have to clean it?" I asked. "Tres," he replied. Okay, so with a calculator I did his cost times three and got another small number. But he was quoting me how much it cost to clean using herbicide, which is about a fifth of the cost of cleaning manually with machete. My first year as a farmer was painfully expensive. And every year since it has cost me more and more. (I could only afford this because I was living in my parents' basement and working production for $11 an hour at a great coffee roaster in the States.) When I purchased the farm, the community leaders said, "You Antonio Galvan, Finca La Paz. This man is a so -spoken, tough-as-nails farmer. Until recently, Byron has never seen him get tired. are going to mark the farm boundaries with barbed wire, right?" "Nope," I said. "The boundaries are clear: this stump to that shade tree to that creek. And that stump to that tree and then straight for a bit." No problem, right? Well, no. The following year, my farm manager, Antonio, and my ornery neighbor almost came to blows over who owned a couple of coffee trees near the unmarked boundary to the South. Later, that same neighbor wouldn't control his chickens. I was passive and played nice. "They can't do that much damage," I quipped. Antonio and I had invested in a bush-bean crop (think red pinto beans) on the irrigated section of the farm. My neighbor didn't feed his chickens, so they came and ate the flowers of the bush beans. A few days later Antonio (after repeated warnings to the guy) put rat poison on some corn and left it on my property. Next thing I know I'm getting a call from the police station about Antonio having poisoned 53 chickens. I have a very long fuse, but that day I played my best New York lawyer and let them have it. "No!" I bellowed. "How many dead chickens do you have? Tres! How do you get from three to 53?" Well apparently there were only three dead chickens, total. I paid for them, and Antonio didn't have to go to jail. One of the most respected coffee buyers I know told me, "Bananas are bad for coffee." So the first thing I did on my farm was cut a banana tree down with a single swing of the machete, and told my manager, "I don't want banana trees here." He looked at me like I was insane. I held on to that idea for a few years, like a child with www.baristamagazine.com 25

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