A total of 25 million farming families in 60 countries depend on coffee for their livelihood. About 70 percent of the world’s coffee is grown by 7 million farmers on farms on than less than 5 hectares (12 acres) of land. Much of the work is still done by hand. Because coffee is raised on mountain sides and in forest it can not be planted and harvested with large machines like corn or wheat, which are grow on flat areas and are harvested with the entire plant being cut down. Coffee bushes take years to reach peak production, which means that growers need to make an initial investment and wait.
These days much of the world’s coffee comes from high-yield robusta plants that grow well in sunny conditions. This has had a harmful effect on the environment by depriving wildlife of trees to live in. In many places subsistence farmers are being driven off their land and are being replaced by sharecroppers.
Arabicas tend to be grown on small farms. A 45-year-old third generation coffee farmer told Smithsonian magazine, “It’s a craftsman job. You’ve got to love it every day.” To produce a good quality crops, he said, requires 32 steps, including understanding the soil, choosing the right beans, cultivating plants in nurseries and giving different mixtures of compost made of coffee ground, cow manure and farm wastes to the coffee plants at different stages of their development. “When they are producing fruit, you must treat them with more respect, just as if they were a mother,” he said.
Harvesting is labor intensive work, with the cherries being picked mostly by hand. The cherries ripen at different times and are ideally picked only when they are ripe. In some places all the cherries on a plant are picked, regardless of ripeness. In other places selective picking is done. An average worker can pick 100 to 125 pounds a day.
Mechanical pickers have been invented but they offer poor results because they yields a mixture or ripe and unripe beans, Scientist are working in a genetically modified coffee with beans that stop short of ripening and then are all ripened at the same time with a chemical spray.
Problems encountered by coffee cultivators include coffee leaf rust and the berry borer, Columbia.
Biotechnology has produced decaffeinated coffee beans. Many coffee growers don’t want these plants anywhere near their plants.
In recent years there has been an effort to bring back Arabica agriculture. See Fair Trade
