Hannah Wallace

Change is Brewing: A Florida University helps revive Haiti's once-robust coffee trade

 

A version of this story is in the summer issue of Modern Farmer. 

Believe it or not, Haiti was once the largest coffee producer in the world. By the late 18th century, this small Caribbean nation was exporting half of the world’s supply of coffee. But over the intervening 200 years, political instability and an extreme lack of infrastructure made it hard for the country to compete in the global coffee market. During the U.S. embargo in the mid-‘90s, most coffee farmers, struggling to survive, began burning their trees to make charcoal—Haitians' only form of fuel—or ripping them out to plant staples like corn and beans.

A decade ago, a delegation from St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida, visited Port-de-Paix, in the Northwest department of Haiti. This small Catholic university has had a 36-year-long relationship with the Port-de-Paix diocese, and it has a long-term commitment to economic development in the region.

“It’s the poorest region of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” says Anthony Vinciguerra, director of the university’s Center of Community Engagement. It also happens to be one of Haiti’s oldest coffee growing regions, with heirloom Arabica coffee trees scattered about.

When Vinciguerra asked local church and community leaders how the university could support development in Port-de-Paix, the answer was clear: Farmers wanted help reviving their coffee industry.

 

“We didn't know beans about coffee!’” recalls Vinciguerra. But St. Thomas has a large population of Haitian students—many of whom study business, trade, and marketing. After an initial investment of $10,000 from a private donor, Vinciguerra  launched a student-run project that allowed students to get hands-on experience with commodity import marketing, sales, and direct trade.

The Cafèière et Cacouyere du Nord Ouest (COCANO) cooperative was born. Since then, over 200 students from disciplines ranging from international business to plant biology have worked on the project. “We even have science students who are trying to eradicate the coffee bean bore beetle with organic treatments and traps,” Vinciguerra says. Giving students these key jobs obviates the need for a coffee broker, which ensures more money for the farmers.

Crucial to the project’s success was finding roasters who could bring COCANO coffee to the global specialty coffee market. The Italian roaster Pascucci Torrefazione was the first to sign on, followed by Miami’s Panther Coffee. 

Panther owner Joel Pollock, a former roaster from Stumptown, remembers his first cupping of COCANO coffee vividly.

“We tasted defects from many angles,” he says. “There were drying problems, uncontrolled fermentation, mold problems, storage problems.”

But after showing farmers how to install drying racks (to get coffee up off the ground), and emphasizing the importance of processing coffee on the same day it’s picked, he’s seen vast improvements. The 2015 harvest, he says, was the best yet. “It’s got this sweet, chocolatey flavor with some acidity and some red fruit,” says Pollock. “It was miles ahead of the first cup I tasted.”

Before COCANO, farmers in Port-de-Paix had been earning a measly $0.60 per pound. But now, they get $3, $3.25, or $3.50 a pound, depending on the quality of their beans. (Pollock employs the “Direct Trade” model, which rewards farmers for quality by paying them well above the Fair Trade price of $2.20 a pound.)

Pulling farmers out of poverty via high-end specialty coffee is a compelling story, but Pollock, whose next cafe is opening in Miami’s Little Haiti, thinks the quality of the coffee should speak for itself. “You have all these people marketing Haitian coffee by tugging at people’s heartstrings,” he says. “We don’t want to make you feel bad about the plight of Haiti. We’re trying to make it so that if we go away, these people are still making killer coffee.”

Wine without Water: the Case for Dry-Farming Grapes

At a recent dinner celebrating “dry-farmed” Oregon wines at Portland’s Southeast Wine Collective, diners listened intently as winemaker Russ Raney explained why he and John Paul decided to form the Deep Roots Coalition.

Evan Roberts from Crowley Wines, Brian O'Donnell from Belle Pente, Katie and Tom Monroe from Southeast Wine Collective, and Russ Raney, founder of Evesham Wood

“Back in the late ‘90s, we were astonished by the number of vineyards that were going into the Willamette Valley with irrigation,” said Raney, who is the founding winemaker at revered Oregon winery Evesham Wood. The Willamette Valley, which gets 42 inches of rainfall a year, seemed like one place that you shouldn’t need to irrigate—or so believed Raney, who had worked on vineyards in Germany, where irrigation is frowned upon. John Paul of Cameron Winery in the nearby Dundee Hills adamantly agreed. Not only was the duo passionate about conserving water, they aspired to make complex, place-driven wines. In 2004, they formed a small collective of winemakers who spurn irrigation, relying on natural rainfall alone. They called it the Deep Roots Coalition, in honor of the way non-irrigated vines’ roots sink deep into the soil in search of moisture.

My story on the merits of dry-farming vineyards—both for the planet and the palate—appears in the winter issue of Modern Farmer.

Imperial Stock Ranch: Spinning a Good Yarn

This Field Note appears in the Design section of Modern Farmer (pg. 64):

Anna Cohen's lipstick red Charlie Dress, made of Oregon wool

Since 1999, rancher Jeanne Carver's Imperial Stock Ranch in central Oregon has spun spools of beautiful raw wool yarn. Dyed, carded, and spun on site, “Imperial Yarn” has fetched rave reviews from knitters, who love its natural softness and sheen as well as its spongy, lightweight texture. It was also the favorite domestic wool of designers at Ralph Lauren, who sought it out for the patchwork cardigans that Team U.S.A. wore at the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics.

Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carver has now teamed up with green fashion designer Anna Cohen to do a line of “ranch-to-runway” apparel. The collection, which debuts this fall, will have more than a dozen elegant pieces for women. Our favorite is the Stella Dress ($680), a sexy, geometric frock inspired by the work of midcentury modern great Frank Stella and the lipstick red Charlie Dress ($350), which wouldn’t seem out of place on Jackie O. (Suggested retail prices: check website for stores.)

A Match.com for Farmers and Chefs

Most farmers would rather be knee-deep in dirt than rustling up business with school food buyers and James Beard-award-winning chefs.

Lucky for marketing-shy farmers, in recent years a new tool has cropped up to make life easier: online food hubs. Unlike physical food hubs—central facilities that aggregate, distribute, and market food for farmers — online food hubs are more akin to dating web sites, efficiently connecting local food producers (farmers, ranchers, fishermen, dairies, brewers, etc.) with wholesale buyers (restaurants, grocers, schools, hotels, and hospitals). Think of them as the Match.com of the food world. A farmer posts his crop on his site— “Our 9 acres of biodynamic blueberries will be available for purchase in mid to late June” — and a local chef may see the posting and send an internal e-mail to the farmer telling her to reserve two palettes of Earliblue. Online food hubs allow food producers who might have once hired a sales or PR person to keep more of every dollar they earn.

The Food-Hub.org Homepage

The paragon of online food hubs, Food-Hub.org, was created by the Portland, Oregon-based environmental think tank Ecotrust. Many enduring matches have been made on FoodHub.org, which launched in February 2010, and already has nearly 5000 members in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how it works. A producer, such as Davidson Commodities in Spokane, Washington, will post something under “Marketplace.” “Available: GMO-free specialty lentils, garbanzo beans and split peas.” In this case, Portland’s Grand Central Bakery and SoupCycle (a soup delivery service that delivers soup by bike) both saw the posting and sent an internal e-mail to Davidson Commodities.

Think of them as the Match.com of the food world.

Now, both companies buy their beans from Davidson. (Food-Hub.org does not orchestrate deliveries but sellers can specify if they include delivery or if they prefer on-farm pick-up.) Buyers can post want ads, too. The director of child nutrition at the Wahluke School District in central Washington posted on Food-Hub.org that she needed local tomatoes and cucumbers. She was contacted by Bella Terra Gardens, 30 miles away, and pre-ordered enough produce to fill the salad bars at the district’s five schools. Food-Hub.org also has a special feature called a “hot sheet” where sellers can post what’s in abundance (or “hot). At press time, Dancing Roots Farms in Troutdale, Oregon, was eager to move arugula and several varieties of kale.

The site has become an invaluable tool for busy farmers who often are clueless as to which restaurants, schools, or pubs to target. “Most producers are in rural areas and the buyers are in urban areas, and producers often don’t know who the chefs are, or who the food service folks are. It collapses all that research time,” says Amanda Oborne, director of Food & Farms at Ecotrust.

The concept of online food hubs has taken root in the U.S. — where a dozen similar sites have launched in recent years from Michigan to Nevada. But these sites are starting to spread in other countries, too. Inspired by Portland’s Food-Hub.org, the Canadian environmental non-profit GreenBelt launched Ontario Fresh two years ago.

Mark Kenny, Lead Purchaser for Ontario Fresh, handing off Ontario produce to his chef at the University of Guelph.

Thus far, the site has attracted nearly 2,000 members from all over the province. In the United Kingdom, there’s FoodTrade, which launched in Beta last winter and already has about 500 members. Though most members are UK- based, Founder Ed Dowding has dreams of going global. “If we do it right, we can trade internationally perfectly sustainably, and should do so,” he says. “Local is only part of the answer.”

Though online food hubs have their limitations — most don’t provide distribution or a central pick-up location — they are creating new business opportunities for rural growers and food producers at the click of a mouse.

This story originally appeared last week on ModernFarmer.com