Why don’t we see more organic coffee farms?

James Harper: I'm in Marcala, a small town in western Honduras. It's February 2023, and I'm in a car that pulls up outside the offices of one of the most successful organic cooperatives in the region, RAOS - Regional de Agrícultores Orgánicos de la Sierra. I step out of the car, and it's a beautiful, sunny day. I walk inside RAOS’ offices. I pass a couple of coffee farmers who are waiting to get paid for their recent consignment of coffee cherries. I spot a few sacks of organic fertilizer sitting in the corner. I see stacks of manuals for how to farm coffee organically, and I make my way into the main office where I meet the president of RAOS.

Recognize Don Rufino? This is the same Don Rufino from the last episode. He runs one of the best organic farms in the area and he's also the president of the cooperative. Today, the RAOS Cooperative has 250 members, together growing almost a thousand hectares of coffee organically.

Sustainable Harvest, the sponsor of this episode and a leading importer for organic fair trade coffees, they tell me that RAOS has a reputation for being very professionally run and is one of the big reasons why Marcala and the surrounding region is one of the top growing areas for organic coffee in Honduras and much of Central America.

But 30 years ago, it was a very different story. Don Rufino tells me what Marcala was like back in those days. I pictured myself standing on a coffee farm on one of those mountain slopes that encircle the town of Marcala, and as I look down on the Alala River, snaking its way on the bridges and in between the rectangular buildings of terracotta roofs. This river, which should be crystal clear, blue, right now, it's black. As I look to my left and right, I see coffee pickers going up and down the slopes, picking off cherries, because it's harvest time. But farmers back then, they would remove the red juicy flesh from around the coffee beans themselves, and then dump this red juicy flesh into the local rivers. This fruit will contaminate the river, and you would see dead fish being carried downstream.

A dead fish bobs past one of Marcala's health clinics and outside the door of the health clinic is a line of very sick looking coffee farmers waiting. Don Rufino shares a story with me when, you know, he was working as a laborer on someone else's coffee farm and he was spraying all these agrochemicals on the plants, which is common practice. Everybody back in the 90s was using agrochemicals. But for Don Rufino, spraying his chemicals day after day, he tells me he got really, really sick. And actually, at one point, thought he was gonna die. I imagine my gaze wandering from the clinic to some other nearby buildings and I see a shop front. But it's boarded up, closed, and parked outside is an old dusty pickup sale sign attached. This is the consequence of the big collapse in coffee prices in the early 90s. At that moment in time, you know, whether you collected your coffee cherries or not as a farmer, frankly, it didn't matter. You were going to lose money no matter what you did.

I could imagine if I was Don Rufino back then, looking around, seeing all these problems, I would think to myself, “Screw this, screw coffee, I'm getting out of this. I'm doing something else.” But Don Rufino and a handful of other coffee farmers who are scattered across these mountains, they see an opportunity to earn more money for their coffee, to avoid touching agrochemicals and getting sick, to breathe life back into the fish and change the color of the Marcala River from black back to blue. And they think the solution is to go organic.

In the last episode, I showed you what Don Rufino's organic farm looks like. His farm is the model that hundreds of other farmers in this region try to copy. I ended the last episode thinking to myself, this is an amazing way to grow coffee. It's kind to the environment, the birds love it, Don Rufino is really happy. You avoid the CO2 footprint of using agrochemicals. Because so many in this region have gone organic, the river is now clean, people aren't getting sick from agrochemicals. Marcala, as far as I can tell, is a thriving coffee town.

But the thing is, in most of the rest of Honduras, in most of the rest of Central America, in most of the world, organic coffee is not how things are done. It's still a niche. Less than 10 percent of the world's coffee is grown organically. And it's a niche because growing organic as a coffee farmer is really difficult. The fact of the matter is it's easier to farm coffee conventionally with agrochemicals.

So in this episode, I'm going to show you the story of the RAOS cooperative, and how they overcame hurdle after hurdle after hurdle, and why today, after having made this story, I now find myself choosing organic coffee whenever I can. I'm very happy to pay a little more for it.

I'm James Harper. And this is The Science of Coffee, a spinoff series from my documentary podcast Filter Stories and a journey into coffee's hidden microscopic secrets. So, why are there so few organic coffee farms? There are many benefits to going organic, but many, many hurdles and problems. Especially if you're a small-scale farmer. And the majority of the world's farmers are small in scale. You know, they farm maybe an acre, a couple of acres. So looking at the story of the RAOS Cooperative here in Honduras, what can their journey teach us about the challenges of going organic?

Back in the late 80s, Don Rufino is experimenting a bit trying to grow coffee organically. And over time, he connects with other farmers in the area who all want to go organic. But the first problem is that they didn't know how to farm organically; how to do it in a way where the trees actually produce a lot of cherries. But here's the thing, going organic is much more complicated and difficult to figure out compared to conventional coffee farming with agrochemicals. In a conventional farm, you follow a farming rule book that doesn't really change that much between regions. Don Rufino tells me that when agrochemicals came onto the scene in the 60s and 70s, they had very clear instructions. You apply this much fertilizer at these times. You apply this much fungicide at these other times. Here are the chemicals. Now go off and do it over and over again.

Now, of course, there are countless books out there on farming organically, and today you could watch thousands of hours of YouTube videos learning how to do organic farming. But the issue with organic farming is that what works on one person's farm may not work on your farm. A few years ago I made a story about a pioneering coffee farm in Ecuador called Firefly. Murray Cooper, the guy who ran the farm, started it about 15 years ago and it wasn't like the early 90s when Don Rufino was getting into organic coffee. Ecuador had the internet, he could hop on Skype for free and talk to farmers anywhere in the world, and he did all these things, but his trees barely produced any coffee cherries.

Because in organic agriculture, what works in someone else's farm won't necessarily work in your farm. Now, Let's look at Don Rufino's situation. This is back in the early 90s in quite a remote part of Honduras. He doesn't speak English.

Even if he wanted a book on growing coffee organically, where's he gonna go? Rufino tells me one of the big ways they cracked this “How do we grow coffee organically” puzzle was with a bit of outside help. They got connected with a German woman.

Andrea Futterer: Well, I'm Andrea Futterer.

James Harper: Back in the nineties, Andrea was working for GIZ, the German Government's International Development Agency. Andrea had experience working with organic coffee farms in neighboring Nicaragua. So they all hopped on a couple of pick-ups, drove down to Nicaragua...

They filled their notebooks with all the organic know-how they could find, came back, and then took stock of all the information they had. For one, they had all this knowledge from Nicaragua, but nobody could say which of these Nicaraguan organic farming techniques would work in Honduras.

Andrea Futterer: Of course there was a lot of discussion because Nicaragua was a very different region. The climate. It’s not as hilly as Marcala.

James Harper: They also had what they had learned up until this point experimenting with organic coffee on their own farms. And finally, they had this intergenerational knowledge about the land that had actually been in their community for centuries.

Andrea Futterer: Their fathers and their grandfathers and so on. Much knowledge accumulated in the people.

James Harper: And then they faced the choice: we don't know whether this is going to work until we try it. And this is a big risk. For many smallholder coffee farmers, coffee farms are an important part of their livelihood, sometimes their only livelihood. Andrea tells me, understandably, people were nervous.

Andrea Futterer: Some people seem to be a bit hesitant.

James Harper: So this is why, in my opinion, one of the first reasons people don't go organic is because it's a risk. Especially if you're one of the first people to do it in a community. What if it doesn't go right? What if you have the same experience Murray Cooper had in that farm in Ecuador I mentioned? It's so much easier just sticking with the agrochemicals. You know what you're going to get. It's reliable. But this story begins because in this group there were some very brave farmers.

Andrea Futterer: Including Rufino, who said, okay, let's go for it. We will try. And this leads me now to the second reason why a lot of farmers choose not to go organic. Yields.

James Harper: And to tell me more about that back at the RAOS offices I met their general manager Roberto. Roberto is the son of one of those early farmers back in the 90s who decided with Futterer and Don Rufino to go organic, and it was nothing short of a disaster. The yield on his father's farm collapsed.

Before they switched to organic, while they were still using agrochemicals, you know, it's common to get about 25 sacks of parchment for every half hectare or so. But in that first year in the mid 90s when they switched to organic, the harvest collapsed from 25 sacks of parchment to 8. The plants looked terrible. Sad. And the reason for this collapse is that the plants and the soil, Roberto tells me, they had adapted to the agrochemicals. Coffee farmers switching to organic ditch the blue pellets of artificial fertilizer and oftentimes use organic compost instead. But for a plant to access these nutrients, they need biology in and around their root systems. Things like fungal hyphae, like we mentioned in the last episode. But these things take time to develop. Thankfully, they did slowly develop. Roberto sees the yields on his father's farm get better and better. The yields collapsed to eight bags, but then the next year went up to ten, then twelve, and upwards, and then depending on the farm, maybe by the fifth year, that's when your yields get close to where they used to be.

James Harper: Now let's just take a step back. This is an enormous blow. This is the second big reason why so many farmers would not want to switch to organic, and indeed, in Marcala, in the coffee farming community, when they saw Roberto's father's yield collapse to a third, they told him, “You're crazy.” And Andrea, tell me how demoralizing it was for that small group of pioneering organic farmers.

Andrea Futterer: So this is of course a very heavy blow if you see this decrease and you have to have the confidence that it really will then with the time establish again.

James Harper: And look, like it was back in the 90s, even today, any farmer who wants to transition to organic is going to have to confront this collapse and slow rebuild of their farm. But when I was at Sustainable Harvest’s Let's Talk Coffee gathering in Honduras, I spoke with someone who claimed to have a solution.

Lalo Perez Varona - Buna: I'm Lalo Perez. I assist any producer who's interested in the transition from conventional, chemical based agriculture over to biological agriculture.

James Harper: And he shared with me a couple of organic tricks, hacks he had used to help a Guatemalan farmer transition from conventional to organic and avoid that trough of despair.

Lalo Perez Varona - Buna: So it's fairly simple. We do three things. The first thing we do is we apply very dense and diverse biological inoculants to reset the soil biology. The second thing we do is we apply foliar micronutrients, and the third thing we do is we apply a bio stimulant.

James Harper: And Lalo claims, when the farmer stopped using agrochemicals, the plants didn't look sad like they did for Roberto.

Lalo Perez Varona - Buna: Then the plant is suddenly healthy.

James Harper: And they managed to avoid that sharp collapse in yields.

Lalo Perez Varona - Buna: He was able to replace fertilizer and fungicide within six months.

James Harper: Now Lalo told me he wants everyone to know about these techniques. So if you're a farmer and you want to transition to organic, get in touch with him. I've got a link in the show notes. I really do hope this works and we find other techniques for farmers to avoid that trough of despair, but as it stands, that is the second big reason why farmers wouldn't want to transition to organic. So now I want to take you to the third hurdle farmers have to overcome if they want to go organic and that is they have to find a way to get paid more for their coffee.

I had many conversations with organic farmers in the area and they all told me that generally speaking going organic takes a lot more time and know how, but also generally yields are a little bit lower than what you would get on a conventional farm using agrochemicals and to make up for that, you've got to find higher prices, which very quickly leads you to the whole discussion around certifications. To take an example, in the fairtrade system, the minimum fairtrade price for organic farmers is 22 percent higher than conventional coffee farms using agrochemicals. And getting certified, it's a whole complicated long process, today there are many hoops to jump through, and back in the 90s for this small group of coffee farmers it was a nightmare for them too. Fortunately, they had Andrea Futterer to help them.

Andrea Futterer: So it was a long process at that time, still with the fax machine. So all the days we were sending huge faxes from Germany to Honduras, always making a lot of questions and they were answering every question, okay, the container must be like that and you have to look for this and the paperwork is like that and you need that.

James Harper: The point is, getting a certification, it's a hurdle for a farm of any size, and just because your coffee is certified doesn't always mean you're going to get higher prices. It's a vast, complicated topic. I don't get too far into it here. The point is farmers need to earn higher prices to compensate them for the lower yields and more time and energy they're putting into the farm. Getting higher prices, especially through certifications is a long, complicated, expensive process and it's not a given you will actually get higher prices every year. So that's the third hurdle, why many farmers would choose not to go organic. Look, if you're growing coffee conventionally, and your farm is running fine as a business, why would you go through all this hassle?

So, in 1998, that small group of organic farmers finally managed to export 22 sacks of certified organic coffee to Germany, and you think at this point, look, they've made it. This group of farmers, they managed to grow organic coffee, they managed to get certified, and they managed to sell their coffee. Well, unfortunately, there is another hurdle, the fourth hurdle, in my opinion, which prevents farmers from growing organic, and that is being a part of a successful organic cooperative.

So let's say you're a small-scale farmer, somewhere in Marcala, and let's say you're motivated like Don Rufino and don't want to use agrochemicals on your coffee farm, you like seeing your farm as a haven for nature and other life.

By yourself, outside of a cooperative, it's almost impossible for your farm to be commercially viable as an organic farm because you need access to better prices, you have to find a way to pay for certifications. and a small-scale farmer can't afford the many thousands of dollars it takes to certify a coffee farm. The only viable solution for you is to join an organic coffee cooperative. The organic cooperative will teach you how to grow organic coffee. They will manage the certification process for you. They can get your coffee farm certified much, much, much cheaper and they will do the hard work of finding buyers who hopefully pay higher prices for your organic coffee. That's the promise. Your decision as a small-scale farmer who wants to go organic really depends on the organic cooperative and how well it's being run. Is it open to new members? Can they support you in this transition? Are they good at getting high prices for you? But this is the problem. It's really hard. This is how Jorge Cuevas, the chief coffee officer at Sustainable Harvest, put it.

Jorge Cuevas: The job of the smallholder coffee cooperative manager is probably the most difficult job. In all of coffee.

James Harper: And Roberto from the RAOS cooperative, he admits that 20 odd years ago, in the early 2000s, those early days of the cooperative, they were not doing a stellar job.

Roberto tells me a story, back in 2005 they had been invited to Let's Talk Coffee, Sustainable Harvest annual gathering of coffee farmers and other professionals from across the world and Sustainable Harvest asked RAOS, “Hey, bring along some of your coffee; let's see what it tastes like.” And RAOS brought along some coffee. The coffee wasn't in green bean form, which is standard practice.

It was in the stage before that where it had this thick yellow encasing around the coffee bean. RAOS, at the time, didn't have the ability to get rid of that parchment, to get to the green beans. And it's the green beans which you roast, grind, and brew coffee. So you can taste what it's like. The point is, The RAOS cooperative didn't know how to assess the quality of their own coffee. If a cooperative doesn't know what the quality of its own coffee is, they cannot negotiate better prices for their members. They're in the dark. And RAOS were not alone.

Jorge Cuevas: And half the time, growers had no idea why it was good or good enough or not good enough.

James Harper: Sustainable Harvest was seeing this problem playing out in cooperatives across the region. Jorge tells me there was an enormous knowledge gap.

Jorge Cuevas: If you think early, early 2000s, no, the gaps were gigantic.

James Harper: One of the major reasons that the RAOS Cooperative over the next 20 years managed to grow, expanded the membership to hundreds of smallholder organic coffee farmers, Roberto tells me, is from the insights, the learning they received from Sustainable Harvest. Just like RAOS got help back in the 90s with Andrea Futterer, they also got help in the 2000s onwards from Sustainable Harvest. Sustainable Harvest, they were set up to be a social enterprise.

Jorge Cuevas: …using business as a force for social good or for social change.

James Harper: And Sustainable Harvest recognized that if they could elevate the skills of coffee cooperatives, this would help them be much better suppliers of organic fairtrade coffees to roasters.

Jorge Cuevas: It's precisely to have a much more reliable supply chain.

James Harper: But more importantly, it will bring much more prosperity, economic opportunity to these very remote coffee growing regions.

Jorge Cuevas: If now we trained a manager to become better across the board, it doesn't matter if it's my coffee or your coffee or my neighbor's coffee, but if they do better and they're able to achieve better value for their product, for their members, that is systemic change. That's ultimately what creates progress. That's what we set out to do in the first place.

James Harper: So Sustainable Harvest recognized there is a need to level up the skills of cooperatives across Latin America.

Jorge Cuevas: Those capacities are not cheap. They don't happen on their own, so they need to be developed.

James Harper: They already had the Let's Talk Coffee gatherings, which were an opportunity for cooperatives to connect with buyers and learn what the big trends were in coffee-drinking countries. And then on top of this, Sustainable Harvest developed the most valuable producer program. MVP for short.

Jorge Cuevas: MVP is a program that invests directly in the development of capabilities by the supply chain. So copying calibrations, price risk management, new technologies for processing, logistics, efficiencies, access to finance, productivity in the field, improved varieties. Any and all of those, and multiple and multiple layers, because that's how they have the tools to stay competitive in the marketplace.

James Harper: Roberto, the general manager of RAOS, he tells me that the Let's Talk Coffee gatherings, the Most Valuable Producer Program is the best education they've received as a cooperative and with the experience that they have today, they're strong. They feel empowered to negotiate better prices, which means they can pass on these benefits to their cooperative members. A well run cooperative like RAOS is what enabled hundreds of farmers across the region to put down the agrochemicals and convert their farms to organic. The farmers in this region had finally overcome the fourth and final hurdle. They had a successful cooperative nearby who could enable small scale farmers to make a transition to organic in the first place.

James Harper: And I caught a glimpse as to where the RAOS cooperative is today on a hot afternoon. I'm in a 4x4, which takes a turn off the main highway leading out of Marcala, and we park up into RAOS’ dry mill.

And in one of the office buildings adjacent to the warehouse is RAOS’ Coffee Quality Assurance Lab. The day I was there, I saw the Sustainable Harvest team were visiting and they were doing calibration cupping. I stood in the corner of the room and watched for hours as the two quality control teams from Sustainable Harvest and RAOS both tasted the same coffees over and over and over again and inputted their flavor scores into an iPad on an app developed by Sustainable Harvest called Tastify. And they could see to what extent they were aligned on the flavors of the same coffees. On this particular day, Juan Angel Velchez, Sustainable Harvest's former In Country Liaison Officer, said, “Yeah, we're pretty close.”

I also got in the car and went up into the mountains that surround Marcala where I visited RAOS’ Laboratory and Wet Mill. They showed me how they use silver nitrate chromatography to assess the soil quality of their members, then opened a freezer and showed me frozen samples of different fungi, which they add to their organic compost to create a greater array of mountain microorganisms.

I cover why this is really important for these organic farmers in the previous episode. Then as we walk out of the lab and walk down a dirt road, RAOS’ recently renovated, enlarged wet mill, I stare up at this enormous mound of coffee pulp, just like Don Rufino from the previous episode, with huge, white streaks of mountain microorganisms running through it. These are the investments the cooperative is making in itself so it can be of better service to its members.

I hop back in the car and we drive back down the winding mountain roads to the town Marcala. As we're driving down this mountain, I look out the window and I see what seemed to be like natural forests, but they're actually organic coffee farms. It just looks like a forest because they have so many shade trees. This organic movement has spread throughout the mountains surrounding Marcala. It is an enormous success story. I think back to all the hurdles that small group of pioneering organic farmers had to overcome: they had to learn how to farm coffee organically, commercially. They had to stomach that trough of despair when they converted their farms and their yields fell off a cliff. They had to figure out a way of getting higher prices, which they did by coming together as a cooperative, and going through the rigmarole of organic certification. Then they had to compete as a supplier of coffee in a fiercely competitive global coffee market.

But they managed it. And what I find most amazing about this story is that all these hurdles were overcome because the coffee farmers themselves wanted to stop using agrochemicals. They wanted a more vibrant, healthy ecosystem in the farms in which they live. And every year when it comes to coffee farming, it seems like there is yet another hurdle. When I visited, the big challenge they were facing was actually a lack of people. After the pandemic, inflation shot up and many households in these communities couldn't make ends meet. And so many men migrated to the USA illegally to find work and the mill was struggling in the processing of the coffee because the people working in the mill couldn't find anybody to pick the coffee on their own coffee farms, so they had to do it themselves.

But like they say, ‘where there's a will, there's a way’. The car turns a corner and I see the town of Marcala down in the distance. I see the Marcala river winding its way past the terracotta roofs. The river looks like a healthy river. It's not like it was 30 years ago. Black with dead fish, bobbing along being carried downstream. I'm sure this community will find a way to overcome the lack of labor as well, because it was the will of the same group of people that managed to convert many people in this community to organic farming, who changed the landscapes of these hillsides and even managed to change the color of the river.

Doing this story shifted my understanding of organic farming. I now understand why it's so important to the soil, to the ecosystems in and around farms and to the people who choose to go organic.

And I decide I'm gonna support this going forward, and the way I can do that is by buying organic coffee.

While I was making this story Sustainable Harvest, the sponsor, was acquired by Sucafina, a much larger global green bean supplier, and when I was on the phone with Jorge, I asked him, “What does the future hold for Sustainable Harvest?” Here's what he told me.

Jorge Cuevas: So here's the fun part about the acquisition of Sustainable Harvest. We recognized that we needed more resources to continue to do what we had been doing. There was increased market volatility. The interest rate environment was shifting, logistics was shifting. So a mid-sized company like Sustainable Harvest was starting to feel like, “Hey, I'm vulnerable.” Which by the way, was a vulnerability that we had never, never felt before, but sure enough, you just needed to have a stronger foundation to withstand the market environment. So the beauty about the acquisition is that they came and said, “Hey, in about five to seven years, we wanted to improve our sustainability credentials, and we wanted to move in the direction of where Sustainable Harvest is going. By acquiring you guys and working together, we're gonna get there in two.” Basically, Sucafina was already well on its way, and we just helped them accelerate where they wanted to go since Harvest remains independent. It operates independently; we have our own managing director. We remain a certified B Corp. Basically we get to continue to do what we have done so far, with just more resources available to us.