By Heather Farrell
The air cools as we pass through La Zona Alta – The High Zone – on our way to Pedro Mejia’s coffee
farm. The Honduran village is appropriately named – we’re level with the clouds
that still cling to the mountains across the valley, remnants of last night’s
thunderstorm. My coworker, Pedro Hernández, guides the motorcycle carefully on
the damp dirt roads. We’re meeting Mejia to walk his field with him and do a
leaf analysis that will identify disease prevalence and nutrient deficiencies
on his farm.
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| Pedro Mejia holds up a rust-affected leaf. |
Mejia has worked with Unión MicroFinanza for years,
participating in our microloan program and selling us his specialty-grade
coffee. But Mejia’s past harvest, like so many in Central America, was affected
by the outbreak of coffee leaf rust, known in Spanish as
la roya. Now he wants advice on what to do about it.
Mejia knows about leaf rust: he has been to large, general trainings
offered by engineers from coffee organizations in Honduras. But as for a
specialist from any organization coming to his farm to show him what to do in
practice? “Never,” Mejia says. His two fields are less than two acres each, and
the larger organizations do not have the resources to visit small farms like
these.
Unión MicroFinanza has begun
individualized field trainings to meet this need. A majority of the farmers in
this region own small lots; but each finca,
or coffee farm, has different agricultural needs. Coffee leaf rust will not be
brought under control through general trainings, or through educational
materials offered at a price outside the budgets of most coffee farmers. Each
farmer, no matter the size of their field, must know how to control and prevent
the disease from spreading.
“Look, this is lempira – it’s resistant,” Mejia points to
the rust-resistant coffee variety that’s full of leaves and easy to distinguish
on an affected farm. Three-quarters of this finca
is red catuaí, a variety known for its quality, but which is susceptible to
leaf rust. Some of the plants are recovering from leaf rust and have a good
number of leaves, some have only a few leaves hanging on, and some Mejia has
already cut down because they were beyond recovery. Last harvest, only 50
percent of his red catuaí cherries ripened. The rest didn’t ripen because the
plant didn’t have enough leaves to produce energy for ripening the fruit.
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| Mejia and Hernández conduct a leaf analysis of the farm. |
Mejia plunges deeper into his field to show us more plants.
I struggle to keep up, sliding on the loose earth, crashing through dead
branches, and getting facefuls of spider webs and wet leaves. Hernández shows
Mejia how to perform the leaf analysis – pick 100 leaves from different trees
without looking at them. Then, they examine the sampling, and based on shape
and color irregularities, determine what nutrients the plants lack and what
diseases are present (leaf rust isn’t the only coffee plague: diseases like
ojo de gallo can be just as damaging to
leaves, and affect varieties resistant to rust.)
“We recommend you do the analysis each month. The purpose is
to control roya through nutrition and vigilance, to see if it’s going down,”
Hernández says.
After the analysis, we move down the road to Mejia’s second
farm. Right away, we see the plants are dramatically different from those on
his other field. These lush young trees are of the variety yellow catuaí.
Already they are laden with green cherries. I haven’t seen branches of catuaí
trees so full of coffee in a while. Seeing these beautiful young plants, I now
understand why Mejia might consider stumping and replanting on his older field.
The trees on his other farm are 12 years old; they’re tall
and already have most of their expected harvests behind them. Yes, it would be
less time, work and money if they could recover from the leaf rust after a
year. But the time and money put into fighting the disease and trying to
re-grow leaves wouldn’t be worth it; it’d be better to wait the two years
needed for a new plant to produce a harvest. And, as farmers are now fully
aware, preventing a disease like leaf rust is much easier than fighting it off
once it has settled in and done its damage.
I ask Hernández if leaf rust was so bad last harvest because
it caught everyone off guard.
“Yes, the outbreak was a surprise, so there wasn’t a chance
for prevention,” he says.
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Mejia walks between rows of
red catuaí coffee plants. |
With his yellow catuaí, Mejia is ahead of the leaf rust: he
can make sure the young plants stay healthy, with all the nutrients they need
to ripen their large harvest while fighting off any leaf rust attacks. If he
sees the rust start to take hold, he can use preventative sprays before it
damages the plants.
As for his older field, he will control the rust as well as
he can and wait a year to see if the plants recuperate. Hernández recommends a
prevention product based on the results of the leaf analysis (more than 50
percent of the sampled leaves showed rust), and calculates how much of it Mejia
will need. He’ll be able to purchase the product with the help of a microloan
from Unión MicroFinanza.
If the trees don’t recover, he will stump some trees and
clear the rest to plant anew.
“But I want to replant with catuaí again. And maybe bourbon.
They have good flavor and I don’t want to lose that,” Mejia says. This is
exactly what Unión MicroFinanza hopes – that farmers will maintain diversity on
their fields and keep coffee varieties such as catuaí and bourbon that result
in more flavorful coffee. Through individualized trainings, farmers will
receive the practical knowledge they need to overcome coffee leaf rust and
produce a consistent harvest of high-quality coffee.
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