The Survival Gardener's Guide to Growing Your Own Caffeine:

Coffee, Tea, and the Black Drink

by David The Good

Published by Florida Food Forests, Inc.

Florida, USA

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Copyright © 2016 by David Goodman.

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Introduction
If everything collapsed, would you still be able to get a cup of coffee or
tea? For how long? Much like nicotine, caffeine is an addicting substance
that helps improve concentration and our ability to deal with life. Unlike
tobacco, however, researchers have had a hard time pinning caffeine into
the “bad” addiction camp. Tea and coffee are both good for you and
contain antioxidants. They’re also excellent when you’re trying to write.
Other sources of caffeine, such as Diet Coke and Red Bull, will not be
covered in this book since I quit soda long ago and also don’t wish to
delve into what it would take to make those things from scratch. Imagine
making your own high-fructose corn syrup and Red #40 at home! No.
Also, if you did manage to manufacture Diet Coke in your garage, there is
a non-negligible chance of you getting busted for having a meth lab. “I
swear I was just trying to make Coke, officer!”
That won’t go over very well.
Also, I’m a gardener, not a chemist, so what I’ll share in this booklet will
be based on the caffeine that you can grow in your yard or in containers,
getting a healthy backyard buzz like the Good Lord intended when He
invented this magical molecule.
Sure, there’s some sense to giving up addictive substances that may
become unavailable during a crisis. There are also plenty of people
hanging on to negative and harmful addictions they should shed regardless
of potential apocalyptic futures. But caffeine? That’s our friend! You
wouldn’t want to kick a friend to the curb just because the supermarket
shelves are bare and your last can of espresso is almost empty… would
you? Is that how much friendship means to you?

Why Grow Your Own Caffeine?

Reason #1: Caffeine Gives You Powers
Ever pull an all-nighter in college? I did once, through the power of a 2-
liter bottle of Mountain Dew. (Maybe that’s why I don’t drink the stuff
anymore: it reminds me of a sub-par English project.) Truly, though, the
power of caffeine to control your energy levels and give you a burst when
you need it can really help with productivity. Gotta get your garage
cleaned out? Double-shot of espresso! Need to finish a report for work?
Chai latte! Need to keep on top of a work crew after a hurricane? Hot
black coffee! Just don’t burn yourself out by overindulging and you can
really kick tail with a bit of caffeine power.
Reason #2: Caffeine Will Be High Value in a Collapse
If shipping is shut down or we’re at war, coffee or tea will be hard to find
and its value as a luxury good will soar. People will kill – or at least hand
over some valuables – for a good cup of coffee or a glass of sweet tea. Be
the person with caffeine and rule the wasteland.
Reason #3: Self-Sufficiency
I enjoy growing caffeine because I like producing much of what I
consume. Growing staple root crops, grains, vegetables and fruits is
cool… but what if you also grew your morning cup of coffee? That’s
seriously cool and puts more of your daily diet under control. Caffeine is a
food group, right? The gardener, unlike the stockpiler, doesn’t need to rely
on far-away nations to provide himself with a supply of coffee or tea; he
can grow his own.
Reason #4: Control Over Safety
You may have read that coffee is one of the most pesticide-heavy crops in
the world. This is obviously not good if you drink a lot of coffee. Tea may
not be much better.
One source reports:
“According to Peter Goggi, a spokesman for The Tea Association of the
USA, the amount of commercial pesticide in your cup is “a very low
amount,” but recent research into some samples taken of various tea
brands says that is far from true.
For example, dangerously high levels of pesticides were recently found in
Celestial Seasonings tea, and the company has refused to release a report
about the pesticides they use to grow their teas. (Can you say boycott!?)
It isn’t just tea grown in the US, either. A recent report released by
Greenpeace that tested tea from China and India found copious chemicals,
too. In 49 Indian tea samples tested, nearly 60 percent contained at least
one pesticide above the safety limits set by the European Union. China’s
teas weren’t any better with nearly 67 percent of samples (18 total)
containing pesticides that were previously banned under the Stockholm
Convention.”(1)
Grow your own tea and coffee and you’ll know exactly what went into
growing them. Caffeine is nice – pesticides aren’t.
Reason #5: Bragging Rights
This isn’t super important unless you have Narcissistic Personality
Disorder, but presenting someone with a cup of tea or coffee and telling
them “I grew this” is pretty amazing. When our pastor visited our
homestead for the first time to say “hi,” we were able to share some
homegrown tea with him, which he enjoyed. That made me feel pretty
awesome. In retrospect, though, I probably should have listened to more
sermons on the evils of pride.
 Major Sources of Caffeine

Caffeine, despite its great influence on human civilization, is not widely

available in the plant world. The two major sources are the leaves of a
camellia we call the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) and the seeds of the
coffee tree (Coffea spp.). It also exists in varying quantities in cocoa,
guarana, the kola nut, yerba maté and other hollies, and a smattering of
other plant species. One caffeine source native to North America which is
a greatly underutilized species is the yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), a
marvelous drink in its own right.
In this booklet we will cover that excellent source of tea alongside true tea
and coffee. Most sources of caffeine are unfortunately tropical species
which are difficult to grow anywhere with frost, yet the yaupon holly has a
range that extends all the way north into USDA Zone 7 and can be grown
beyond that with some winter protection or as a containerized specimen.
Coffee, unfortunately, is the hardest species to grow and process, since it’s
a truly tropical plant and has specific growing conditions for good yields
which are hard to duplicate for the home grower. It must be covered,
though, as it’s delicious and we wants it, precious, yes we wants it.
Let’s start with coffee, then cover true tea and wrap up this booklet with
the easy-to-grow yaupon holly.
 Coffee

What does coffee have to do with survival gardening?

If you’re asking that question, you must be one of those strange and rare
creatures that live their lives in a state of drug-free serenity.
Perhaps you sleep in late, eat only vegetables, and calmly spend hours
watching a fishtank in your condo.
For those of us addicted to caffeine, coffee (or tea) isn’t just a plant. It’s a
need. A burning need combined with pleasure. The smell of roasted
grounds… the hiss and bubble of a percolator… the first hit of the day…
These things will make the oncoming Econopocalypse almost bearable.
I mean, honestly: who wants to face a horde of the undead or fight with
AI-equipped death-dealing homing drones without a cup o’ joe in the
morning?
Not I.
Coffee, unfortunately for those of us dwelling in non-tropical climes, is a
completely tropical plant. It likes somewhat cool temperatures but cannot
stand the frost. Growing coffee outdoors north of south Florida or outside
of Hawaii is tough.
That said, there are ways to grow it outside of its natural range.
Thanks to its ability to grow as an understory plant, coffee can be
successfully cultivated indoors and in sheltered locations through the cold
of winter if you don’t let sit at below-freezing temperatures. I grew coffee
along the south-facing wall of my North Florida home and it sailed
through nights that hit the teens further out in the yard. That wall radiated
warmth overnight and was basically USDA Zone 10, even when the yard
dropped into USDA Zone 8 territory.
If you live in a place like South Florida or California, you can pop some
coffee plants into your yard and they’ll grow without too much care.
I grew a coffee tree in a large pot for about four years and it paid me with
a few handfuls of fruit a year. During the freezes I kept it in my
greenhouse. During the spring, summer and fall, it resided in a shady spot
outdoors, happily blooming every spring and producing coffee cherries in
the fall and winter.
Though I’ve been told that “good” coffee only comes from the mountains,
I’m not all that concerned. If shipping lines fail, I will happily enjoy my
locally grown coffee.
For the time I owned that first productive coffee tree, all the beans were
used to grow baby coffee plants which I sold through my (now defunct)
nursery.
A word on those “beans”: they’re not really beans. They’re the seeds
inside a small fruit called a “coffee cherry.” Coffee cherries taste a lot like
sweet red bell peppers with a bit of spice to them.
Not bad at all. Just spit out the seeds, then roast and grind them.
Propagating Coffee from Coffee Beans
Coffee trees take a little bit of time to propagate. It’s often propagated by
seed which is how I had success. Cuttings can be rooted under mist,
allegedly, but my greenhouse rooting experiments were all failures so I
switched back to seed-grown trees even though the time involved was a bit
silly.
Here’s why germinating coffee seeds is a little tough:
1. You need fresh seeds
I’ve bought coffee seeds through the mail and tried to germinate them.
They all failed. If the seeds are more than a few weeks – or maybe months
– old, they won’t come up. Roasted beans from the store are obviously not
going to work, so finding green, non-aged seeds is the first thing you need
to do to get started. I paid $30 for my mother coffee tree and then waited a
year for seeds so I could get started on my future plantation.
2. It takes time for coffee to germinate
Coffee beans usually take a couple of months to germinate. Even then, the
germination is uneven and imperfect. Maybe 50-75%. Bottom heat helps.
I’ve had them come up in a month with a heating pad beneath my seed
trays. You need to keep them moist during this time. I put the seed trays on
a large baking tray with a little water in the bottom so they don’t dry out.
That works well for me.
3. It takes time for coffee to grow
From germination, it takes 2-3 years for your new coffee tree to start
blooming. Fortunately, coffee is self-pollinating so you’ll be able to get
beans off a tree without its needing a mate. They grow moderately quickly
if you keep them in acidic soil and supplied with nitrogen. I feed mine
with rabbit manure and coffee grounds. Blood meal is another good
choice.
Coffee takes well to growing in a pot and can actually be grown as a
houseplant year-round. The leaves are attractive, the blooms are lovely
and the fruit is a fascinating conversation piece. Coffee is impossible to
grow outside anywhere much north of south Florida since it can't take the
cold. But the key word is “outside.”
Fortunately for northerners who love their beans, coffee can stand a large
amount of shade, such as you’d have inside a living room. If you have a
sunny window or a skylight, you’ll do fine growing coffee inside during
the winter months. After all chance of frost, you can put it out on the porch
so it can enjoy the warmth of summer… just make sure you bring it back
inside before cold strikes again. Some years ago I saw a YouTube video
where a guy in New Jersey was growing coffee in his apartment beneath a
skylight – and it was covered in fruit. Awesome.
Note: when you keep a plant in a pot, it’s easy to over or under-water. Just
give it a good soaking when the top inch or so has dried out. About once a
week should be good. Coffee is pretty forgiving of less than regular
waterings, but it will droop and let you know when it's not happy.
The plant itself is a glossy-leaved and attractive fellow that flowers in
early spring and fruits along its stem in clusters. They almost look like
plastic and make a nice houseplant. From flowering to fruiting takes nine
months, so be patient.
Once your harvest ripens, you can break open the red fruit or simply eat it
and spit the “beans” out to be saved for roasting. I know a guy that made
his own bean roaster from an air popcorn popper and a thermostat. Your
mileage may vary.
To roast your own beans, go hit up YouTube. There are plenty of ways to
do it at home and I'm not a gourmet roaster, just a caffeine addict.
What I can tell you on cultivation: it’s hard to kill coffee when it’s
growing in good soil and warm conditions. If you move it into full sun, it
will burn the leaves and make it unhappy. If it goes without water for too
long, it will wilt but usually recovers rapidly when water is reapplied. Just
keep it fed and watered and it will reward you with plenty of rich, glossy
leaves and abundant blooms and fruit. I met a man at the Kanapaha plant
show in 2015 who was growing coffee trees in his yard somewhere around
Gainesville. They’re brought in during freezes but he told me he’s had
great success with fruiting and production.
According to my non-scientific estimates, a serious coffee drinker will
require about 25 bushes to stay caffeinated through a year. An occasional
coffee drinker will only need a few. They bear more and more every year
and can grow into a decent-sized tree under good conditions; however,
taking care of that many trees and staying on top of picking, drying and
roasting will be a pain. Can you imagine keeping 25 coffee trees inside
your house? Crazy, but it would be kind of awesome.
Since my coffee growing has been limited to non-commercial levels and
because this plant is the king of caffeine sources, I interviewed a
commercial Kona coffee farmer on what it really takes to grow and
process coffee. The transcript of that presentation is included in the
appendix of this booklet.
Know this: though you can grow your own coffee in pots or protected
locations, the amount of work it takes to get a decent yield makes this the
most difficult source of caffeine to maintain in a crash unless you live in a
tropical climate.
 Tea

Think tea grows only in China and Japan? Think again. There’s actually a
working tea farm in South Carolina: the beautiful Charleston Tea
Plantation which is owned by the Bigelow Tea Company.
True tea, known in Latin as Camellia sinensis, is also an attractive plant. A
member of the camellia family, you could easily grow a few bushes in
your landscaping and people would just think you liked flowers.
Tea is technically hardy to Zone 7 but I’ll bet you could push that to Zone
6 if you have a south-facing wall or other suitable microclimate. Don’t
trust it to be cold-hardy when young, though: remember that the cold-
hardiness of most species increases as they mature.
If you’re a tea drinker, you might be surprised to know that black tea,
green tea, oolong, white, orange pekoe and a plethora of other incarnations
of “tea” (unless they’re “herbal” teas, which are not from the true tea
shrub) are all from the same plant, just processed in different ways.
Like coffee, tea can be successfully grown in a pot and moved indoors in
colder regions. A big benefit to tea over coffee is that you use the leaves
rather than the fruits. That means there’s not much waiting for harvest
time. You simply gather leaves as you need tea, dry them, and brew away.
Tea Growing
If you can grow camellias, you can grow tea. Tea likes a somewhat acid
soil and a little bit of fertilizing, but not a lot at once. I met some folks
with a tea nursery and they told me their tea plants were happiest with
regular feedings of fish emulsion, a mild fertilizer with a good range of
minerals. My tea plants grow slowly for me though your mileage may
vary. They can tolerate full sun but if you live in an area with brutal
summers, I recommend you put them in a place where they’ll miss some
of the hot Western sun of the afternoon. My tea leaves would burn a bit in
the heat of a Florida summer so I gave them some shade. Tea doesn’t
really need a lot of water, but more water doesn’t hurt them either if the
soil is well-drained. If you don’t have naturally acid soil, you can pot them
in “blueberry” or “azalea” mix potting soil. Coffee grounds are also a good
amendment to provide some slow-release nitrogen. My friend Steven of
[Link] uses coffee grounds as a part of all his potting mixes, since
plants – including tea – love those grounds.
Tea Propagation
Though tea plants can be started from cuttings, I find seeds to be the better
option. Rooting tea takes some time and the young plants are rather weak
compared to seed-grown specimens. It takes about the same time for them
to grow to a good size, so if you can start with seeds, why not do so? Seeds
pop up in about a month but take about 2-3 years before you can start
harvesting many leaves. If you only have cuttings, root them in loose soil
or vermiculite, ensuring the pot is in the shade. Put a stick in the pot and
rubber-band a clear plastic bag over the top of the pot as a humidity tent to
keep the cutting from drying out. Roots will usually start to form in a few
months. Baby those cuttings – they really can’t take much abuse and will
also suffer great damage and likely die if you move them into the sun all
at once.
Tea Harvesting and Processing
Unfortunately, you’re going to need a goodly few backyard tea plants for a
decent harvest. The young leaves and center bud are all that one
traditionally harvests to make tea. You’re looking for the tender new
growth. Just visit your plants when they’re putting on a flush and snip or
pluck off the whole shoot – usually 2-3 leaves.
And remember, how you process tea determines the final flavor.
To make black tea (my personal favorite), roll the fresh leaves around in
your hands to bruise them, then let them dry for a few days and store away.
For green tea, let your freshly picked leaves wilt in the share for a few
hours, then dry the leaves in your oven for about 20 minutes at 250
degrees. This stops the enzymes in the leaves from breaking down, giving
it that crisp, light bitter flavor instead of the rounder, broader flavor of
black tea.
Older, tougher tea leaves have been used in some ancient Chinese blends
but are no longer commonly brewed. That doesn’t mean you can’t
experiment, of course. Experimentation is half the fun!
Tea plants make a nice hedge and in some older Japanese home gardens a
small tea plantation was an integral part of the landscape.
If you can't grow coffee, try tea. If tea still sounds like too much trouble…
the next tree is for you.
 Yaupon Holly

Of the three caffeine sources covered in this booklet, yaupon holly is by

far the easiest to grow and process.
If you want to step off the broad road and take a completely different path
to caffeine heaven, consider growing this native North American tree
that’s been used for centuries as a tea. Though it’s almost completely
unknown in modern times, the yaupon holly makes a delicious drink that
contains a healthy supply of caffeine. Unfortunately, this tree gets a bad
rap, particularly since it’s been given the unflattering Latin name Ilex
vomitoria.
Why?
One story relates that long ago when the Spanish first came to North
America, the natives invited them to a party. At the party, the Indians
drank gallons of yaupon tea, got crazy and jittery, and then vomited up the
contents of their stomachs, much to the surprise of their guests.
Yeah. They used to totally know how to party back then.
Yet yaupon holly isn’t really a purgative. It was just used to excess. Heck,
try drinking a gallon of any tea and see what happens! Better yet, don't try
as you can end up killing yourself by taking in that much water at one
time.
Another darker theory on the nasty Latin name is shared on the website of
the Lost Pines Yaupon Tea company ([Link]
“As to why the drinking of yaupon didn't continue into the modern day,
nobody is quite certain. One theory points to a conspiracy over its
scientific name (Ilex vomitoria) given by William Aiton, the royal botanist
to King George III. Some believe that Aiton gave yaupon this name
because he was in the secret employ of the world’s first multinational
corporation, the East India Company, which wanted to preserve its
stranglehold over the world’s tea trade.” (2)
It’s not fair that this delicious holly got pegged with a yucky name, but
that’s the way life goes when you don’t get to pick your own taxonomical
moniker.
If I could snap my fingers and change yaupon’s Latin name to “Ilex
deliciosa,” I would.
Growing Yaupon Tea
The yaupon holly is an unassuming shrub or small tree which wouldn’t
catch your eye if you saw one during a woodland stroll. On closer
inspection, it does have its own beauty. The bark is pale and smooth, the
leaves small, dentate and glossy green. Female yaupon hollies set the
familiar red berries of holly jolly Christmas fame. These berries are eaten
by birds but not by man.
I planted a yaupon holly in the landscaped swoop by my front door about
five years ago. At planting it was around three foot tall. Now it is a
gracefully slanting 12’ tree, beneath which I placed a birdbath for the
winter berry snackers flitting about its branches.
Nine feet of growth in five years is slow compared to some trees. It really
took a year or more for the yaupon to put on much growth at all. This is
typical with trees as they need to really get their roots under them before
moving upwards. Growing in a pot and then being transplanted is not
natural for trees. As has been said before about planting trees, “first year
they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap.”
Though it is a North American native, the yaupon holly shares true tea’s
dislike of really cold weather and doesn’t grow in any state colder than
USDA zone 7 – though it can also be planted in a container and protected.
Some of the dwarf cultivars are particularly suited for this. If you have the
right climate, the yaupon holly is often planted as a native landscape plant
for its evergreen foliage and attractive trunk.
And for those of you who really enjoy aesthetics with your tea, varieties of
yaupon have been found and bred by the landscaping industry in a wide
range of shapes. I have seen rigidly columnar forms, weeping forms, the
tiny 2’ dwarf forms I mentioned above, and, as I planted in my yard, the
full-size wilder form. Some of these are better for leaf production than
others. You could plant a little tea hedge of dwarf yaupon trees or go big
with a full-size tree. It’s possible to prune for more leaf production and to
keep the leaves in reach for harvest, but you may not end up with a pretty
tree that way, especially if you are butchering back a graceful full-sized
specimen.

Harvesting and Processing Yaupon Tea

When I harvest yaupon leaves I like to do it when the weather (and the
leaves) are dry. I go outside with one of my wife’s stainless mixing bowls
and a pair of nippers. Then I prune the last six inches of younger yaupon
shoots into the bowl; leaves, twigs and all.
To make quick yaupon tea, I simply chop up some of the leaves and small
twigs and pour boiling water over them and let them steep for a while.
This makes a light, pleasant green tea.
For stronger tea, chop up and dry the leaves first, then make tea. The
flavor is pleasant, earthy, and much like a middle-of-the-road English tea.
Excellent.
One way I really like to do them now is to take the green leaves and twigs
from the tree, then chop and toast them on a hot cast-iron pan until they
dry and singe to a pale brown. This creates a smoky, rich flavor that is very
nice and reminiscent of yaupon’s South American cousin yerba maté.
Some readers have told me that toasting or roasting is necessary to free up
the caffeine in yaupon holly but I have been unable to find any details on
that. Plus I lack a lab and can’t test it myself easily. My internal caffeine
sensors aren’t delicate enough thanks to years of black coffee
consumption. Maybe I should give some green yaupon tea to our two-year-
old as a test.
Yaupon holly tea is delicious. It cannot really replace coffee, sadly, since
nothing can do that… but it is a good way to get your morning (afternoon,
evening, midnight) buzz.
Quick note: don’t chew the raw leaves – they’ll irritate your mouth. If you
need caffeine THAT bad, you need to seriously consider rehab.
Easy-to-grow, easy-to-harvest, evergreen, somewhat cold-hardy, attractive
and delicious.
If I were to pick one must-have source of caffeine, this would be it. Sure, I
would miss espresso – but I wouldn’t miss the work involved with
growing coffee.
 Conclusion

I have grown all three of these plants – often at the same time. That’s how
serious I am about preserving my caffeine supply. There’s really no reason
not to pop a couple plants – or a couple dozen – plants in the ground or in
pots. Even if you’re not an addict, there are plenty of people who are.
Imagine how expensive a handful of coffee beans would be after a year of
folks living without them… or the value of a cup of tea when the nearest
plantation is 2000 miles away.
Heck, I’ll bet even zombies would enjoy a cup of nice oolong.
Then again, Ilex vomitoria might be more up their alley.
Good luck. Visit me at [Link] for new gardening
inspiration every weekday—and be sure to sign up for my newsletter while
you're there. I also invite you to subscribe to my popular and entertaining
YouTube channel here: [Link]
If you enjoyed this booklet, you may also enjoy my previous booklet, The
Survival Gardener's Guide to Growing Tobacco, which you'll find here:
[Link]
May your thumbs always be green and your mug always full.
-David The Good

NOTES

(1) [Link]
(2) [Link]
Appendix: Growing Coffee with Kona Coffee
Farmer Gary Strawn
The following is a transcript of an interview I conducted with Kona coffee
farmer Gary Strawn of [Link]. It has been lightly edited for
readability. If you want to know what goes into growing and processing
amazing coffee commercially, this guy knows his stuff. I've bought multiple
bags of Kona Earth coffee and its flavor is nothing short of incredible.

David: I have a really cool guest today. His name is Gary Strawn and he is
a Kona coffee farmer who used to be a computer game programmer and
kind of a jack-of-all-trades sort of a guy. He normally gets over 300.00 an
hour to talk to people but for some reason he has decided to talk to me for
free. Some of you have seen what I have seen what I have written on
[Link] about coffee and I’ve written about it in a
limited fashion because my climate doesn’t allow me to grow it properly
but I wrote an article on it and sent it out to the newsletter about a week
ago and then somebody wrote me and said “hey, I sent this article that you
wrote to a friend of mine who is a coffee farmer and he wrote a blog post
on it.” So I go over to the blog post and Gary was telling me how very
wrong I was in the few things I knew about coffee, and I thought “alright,
here’s an actual coffee farmer telling me about coffee. Either I can get
offended or I can say Gary tell me what I’m doing wrong.” So I decided
because I had just been reading the book of Proverbs to take tack number
two and actually talk to Gary. I am a hobby coffee grower and it has
always just been a fun diversion for me, not something I have to make any
money off of and certainly not the regular source for my morning cup of
caffeine. Welcome Gary, I really appreciate you taking the time out to talk
to me and tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Gary: Yeah, thank you, thank you for having me. You know that post
started with I was just going to reply to my friend about the article because
he was excited about the article. He reads your stuff regularly and I was
just going to reply in a quick e-mail telling him my side of the story. But I
decided, “you know what: this interesting enough that I think other people
would like to read this.” So I typed it all up and then on the final pass I
was like “wait a second, what if David reads this? I better be nicer here!”
So I did go back and edit a few things to try to, you know you actually got
quite a few, quite a bit of it very accurate, far more accurate than average.
I feel like the final piece you came down to was requiring 25 trees to
supply one person with a year’s worth of coffee.
David: Right.
Gary: And that actually fits the rule of thumb very well. On average
that’s kind of the borderline between a professional coffee farm and an
amateur coffee farm and is the rule of thumb, which comes down to about
a roasted pound of coffee per year per tree. So one tree can get you one
pound of roasted coffee every year which is not a whole lot for a
commercial farm but quite a bit for a part-time hobbyist farm. So that,
that’s really what the whole article came down to, I think, and you got that
part accurate.
David: I’m glad because I spent a lot of time reading about coffee and I
have only been growing coffee in a pot and you know occasional seedlings
I planted by the back of my house and what I was getting off of this little
coffee tree which is about 4-foot-tall, 3 to 4 foot, something like that in a
great big pot and took good care of it, kept it in the greenhouse and I
would get a couple of cups of coffee cherries off of it. I never took the
time, I looked at the process of what it takes to skin them, ferment them,
roast them, crack the little shiny stuff off and you there’s like, there is a
whole process to processing it out to coffee and I was going to do it...
except people kept asking me for my little coffee seedlings and then I
realized there was more money in me selling coffee seedlings back when I
had the nursery than actually making a cup of coffee, because a seedling
had more value and nobody could get them. I had tried growing coffee
seeds or coffee beans that I had gotten through the mail before with
absolutely no success because I did not have them fresh enough that they
would still germinate off the plant. They were probably old when they got
filed at the seed company and just wouldn’t work. So I was very excited
about it and a lot of the more prepper-minded people asked me how can I
grow caffeine, can I grow coffee here? I usually tell them “no you can’t
really easily grow coffee here unless you’re really going to be neurotic
about it.” I just tell them to grow yaupon tea instead which is a native
holly with caffeinated leaves. But if one was to grow coffee, what are the
requirements for growing coffee, just basically?
Gary: Well, you have a couple of steps and I don’t want to be too much of
a glass half-empty kind of guy here because the main thing I was getting at
is that it’s not the growing so much it's all the post-growing, all the
processing methods that can be very difficult. There is a big difference
between growing coffee and growing a large crop. Right, like anything if
you just put it out in nature it might grow fantastic but in nature it’s not all
about growing a commercial-level crop. For me trying to make a living off
of it I want the biggest harvest I can because that’s how I feed my children,
not with coffee but with the money. So there’s very different level there. I
think growing a coffee tree is actually relatively easy to do, like any other
tropical house plant you might have. I grew a ficus tree in my home when
I lived on the mainland years ago and it did great but it had to be indoors,
it needed a little more care and coffee can be the same way. But from
going from that coffee tree, getting it to bloom a little bit, yeah, you can
probably do that if it’s a happy tree but going from those blooms to having
a rip cherry, that’s a whole big step right there getting the fruit to actually
ripen correctly and then beyond that having enough fruit that its worth
picking, worth doing something with. So you have some pretty big leaps
and some difficulty between all those steps.
David: Right and then from the point where you actually get the fruit and
the beans, you need to know what to do with them.
Gary: Oh yeah, that just the beginning. The work begins at harvest time.
From there on. I do regular coffee farm tours on my place and people like
to come up because, I mean, how many people have been on a coffee farm
before? They are very often amazed at how much work goes into the
process between harvest and cup. You know it’s very similar to chocolate,
if anybody’s ever looked at chocolate or vanilla. It's the same way – they
are extremely high labor products. You know we kind of take them for
granted like yeah, chocolate is in every grocery store but no real true
chocolate going from the cacao bean and it’s the same with coffee. Going
from the coffee bean to a good cup of coffee there is a lot of extra effort
between there. Now that said, I think it could be done by someone
dedicated, someone interested enough in their backyard.
David: And I imagine climate-wise, they can’t take anything below
freezing, I don’t even think they like to get close to freezing before they
start seeing damage.
Gary: Yeah. So actually a good example of that is here in Kona coffee
grows in a small micro climate. So I’m up on the side of a volcano, the
side of the mountain. If I go down the mountain towards the ocean it gets
warmer and dryer and it quickly gets too hot and dry for coffee even
though we’re not very far into the tropics. We’re at like 19 degrees’
latitude here, where the tropics officially ends up at 23, so we’re pretty
high in the tropics and not right on the equator, yet it is still too hot and
dry down at the ocean. Conversely, if I go up the mountain, so I’m about
2000 feet almost exactly here on my farm, if I went up to 3000 or 4000
feet then it’s too cold. It doesn’t necessarily get to freezing but it’s cold
enough the coffee just doesn’t produce, it doesn’t grow very well, it
doesn’t produce many beans. So it’s very finicky plant. I think one of the
biggest problems you would have in Florida, the weather might be about
right, the winters might be a little bit harsh on it but it’s probably okay,
your soil. Coffee wants a pretty acidic soil, wants a low ph and that’s not
the case so much in most of Florida. So you would have to give it, bring
in, you’d have to be very careful with that ph.
David: Yes, absolutely. The first one that I grew in a great big pot, I took
rotting chunks of sticks and pine bark and compost and made a very kind
of a rich mix and put it in this great big pot so it wasn’t even in the
ground. I deliberately treated it nicely and then I noticed it like a lot of
water, it didn’t like it when it was too hot, it didn’t like it when it was too
dry, and it didn’t like it when it was cold. It would live on my back porch
or in the shade through the warmer, moister times of the year and then
when it got dry and cold it was into the greenhouse and then got watered
pretty regularly there but the growth just stops anytime it starts to get cool
out. If it was nice cool weather for me outside, it seems like the coffee
wasn’t really growing all that much.
Gary: Yes, and I have decent weather here on the farm, it's comfortable
almost all year around. We’re in Hawaii but this time of year we’re just
finishing our winter season and it’s a combination of the colder weather
and the dry season and that puts the trees into their dormant period and
this time of year the rains start to come back, it starts to warm up a little
bit, like in fact today we have a very heavy gloom here on the farm. The
past couple of weeks it was real dry and then we got a heavy soaking rain
just two days ago, that pulls out the coffee bloom. Each of those little
blooms we call it Kona snow because that’s about as close as we get to
snow here. Right now there are these little white flowers all over the
coffee trees. In fact, this morning the bees are just going crazy for them.
They are just all over all the trees it sounds like a factory.
David: That’s marvelous.
Gary: Each one of those flowers will produce a single coffee bean. So I
could actually go out this time of year and count the blooms and then
predict what kind of harvest I’m going to have at the end of the year. It’s
going to take about 6 months or so for those beans to mature and then we
start the harvest season. So our harvest season here in Kona lasts from
August until about February, so it’s quite a long harvest season. We pick
all the coffee by hand which stinks, because it's a lot of labor, that is by far
my biggest expense; that cost of labor having to pick all the beans by
hand. A neighbor of mine was very angry or upset with me that I wasn’t
picking all my coffee myself and I tried to explain to him, “look I just
can’t – it's too much labor.” Even if I tried to pick it myself, even if that
was all I did everyday was pick coffee, nothing else, by the time I got
through the farm it would be ready to start all over again because we do it
about once a month. So normally I will hire a crew of maybe 6 to 12
people. They will come and they will spend about a week picking the
coffee and then about a month later it's ready for the next round for the
next batch. So they pick just the ripe beans and unripe beans behind and
then we do that 4, 5, 6 times a year and it adds up to quite a bit of coffee.
David: Yeah, I have noticed that it ripens successively, it’s not like it just
all comes in at once. You know you are picking for a long time because
when I started picking, well, it’s almost the same schedule here in Florida,
probably a little later because of our cold. I was kind of picking October,
November, December, January. It would start to come in and you would
get your first couple of ripe fruit and then the rest of them were still green
with a little bit of color in them and then a few weeks later you could pick
a few more. It is not really very amenable to commercial production like it
is all going to come in and you can just be done with it.
Gary: Exactly and that is kind of tough too, that as a home grower it
would be another challenge is to get enough because once you pick it it
starts to rot very quickly. I have to process it that day no more than two
days. After that it starts to rot or gets ruined. So as a home grower, if you
didn’t have enough to process it all at once, it would just be wasted. That
is something that the very large farms, because the larger farms don’t hand
pick, they have mechanical pickers and they do struggle with the fact that
the coffee doesn’t ripen all at once because there machines just drive
through the fields, I mean they’ll have acres and acres like hundreds or
thousands of acres and these machines will take everything off the tree,
ripe beans, underripe beans, leaves, twigs everything just gets ripped off
the trees and then they try to sort through it and they can really only do
that once a year.
David: Wow, what a mess.
Gary: It is and so they try to meet their peak harvest, they can maybe get
twice a year on the bigger farms but they’re going to have a lot of
overripe, a lot of underripe and it's far less percentage but when they have
such a high quantity they don’t care about the quality so much – they are
going for as many acres as they can get. So a home grower can be much
more specific. You can pick just the good beans but it is going to be hard
to get enough. For example, when I do custom processing for a lot of my
neighbor's farms, my minimum amount is 50 pounds. So I need about 50
pounds of cherry before it is worth it for me to even turn the machines on.
Less than that it just doesn’t process correctly.
David: What does 50 pounds look like, a couple of 5 gallon buckets?
Gary: Maybe half a dozen 5 gallon buckets. You can image a burlap bag
full of coffee beans. Those are we call then 100 pound bags. Usually when
we refer to them as 100 pounds, that is 100 pounds of the processed green
bean. So let me go through the stage real quick here. We’re ready for the
coffee farmer lingo here.
David: Okay.
Gary: When the fruit is on the tree we call it a coffee “cherry” because it
looks just like a cherry fruit, it’s a little red fruit about the size of a cherry
and similar to a cherry it has big giant pit. The difference is we’re
throwing away the yummy cherry fruit and keeping the pit. That’s where
all the great caffeine is. So it’s a little less fruit than a cherry. It’s a very
thin layer of fruit. So when you pick it off the tree I run it through the
pulper machine that removes that fruity pulp, all that pulp goes out into
my dump truck and the bean that is left over gets dry. Actually, I ferment it
first overnight to remove the pectin layer that is still stuck to the bean and
clean it real thoroughly and I have to do that in order to prevent it from
getting mold, mildew, and other rot. So that’s something that I need the
larger quantity in order for ferment it correctly. If you’re doing it like a
couple of just handfuls you would have to wash each and every bean so
that you get it so it is no longer slippery. You get it nice and dry and clean.
David: So you’re going to pile up a mound of it and let them eat at it
overnight.
Gary: Exactly. So the way I do it I actually have a machine that
mechanically removes most of the mucilage because that is the sugars that
are left on it mostly, so it removes most of the sugars. There is a little bit
left on the bean. I will put them in a giant like 150, 200-gallon vat, fill it
with water and let it ferment overnight. So it’s the same action as alcohol
or something where the yeast is breaking down the sugars turning them
into alcohol, but in this case I’m throwing away the nasty water and
keeping the beans. So throwing away the alcohol, keeping the corn mash,
except in this case it's coffee. Actually, I’ve had people come by on the
farm for tours and they see and they are like, “have you ever tried making
a beer out of this?” and the answer is, I have thought about it a lot and I
know a lot of other farmers that have thought about it but for some reason
no one has managed to successfully pull it off yet. I’ve seen plenty of
coffee-flavored beers but they use the roasted beans afterwards to flavor
the beer rather than using the sugars from the coffee to create the alcohol.
So I don’t know that it is something about that particular fruit. I’ve just
never seen someone do it but that doesn’t mean it is impossible, it just
means I haven’t seen it.
David: And it sort of tastes like a sweet red bell pepper, almost, anyways
to me the coffee cherry does not taste real fruity, instead it's a kind of a
sweetish vegetable flavor with almost a little bit of pepper in it.
Gary: Well there is almost no sugars. There is almost no fruit. You get the
skin on the outside and then the bean on the inside and a very thin layer of
fruit so yeah, it tastes sweet, you can taste the sweetness but there is just
not much there to eat.
David: People would be very sad if you said “hey, I made a coffee liquor”
or coffee beer or whatever and they tasted and they would be like... “I
don’t taste any coffee!”
Gary: Exactly, exactly. So after I ferment it then I lay it out on my drying
deck to dry the beans and I have to get it dry to meet standards of 9% to
12% moisture. So pretty dry, dry enough that it is not going to get moldy,
it is not going to get any pests or other problems with it. That is the stage
that we call “parchment.” So it was cherry at first, I pulped and dry it, that
turns into parchment. The parchment refers to the endocarp which is just a
layer a little like a papery layer, a parchment wrapped around the bean.
That is something that really only farmers see because I store it that way
until I’m ready to sell it, right, because it all comes in at once but it takes
me a whole year to go through that supply. When I’m ready to sell it I will
go through the dry mill process, the hulling process, where we remove that
parchment layer and we are left with what we call the green bean. The
unroasted green bean. So step one was cherry, step two was parchment,
step three is the green bean, and then the final step is the roasted coffee.
Obviously to go from green bean to roasted bean, that is where you take to
a roaster. You can do it. There are a lot of home roasters that will do it. A
really good home roaster is a hot air popcorn popper where it is roasted in
a very similar manner to popcorn. You are trying to just heat it up
relatively quickly, right, you don’t want it to burn, you don’t want it to
scald just like popcorn you’ve got to keep it moving and similar to
popcorn it will go through cracks. It will actually expand, not as violently
as popcorn does, but very similar chemistry is happening inside that bean
– it is the water boiling. So coffee goes through two different “cracks:” the
first crack is often what we call medium roast and then the second crack
will be a dark roast. Starbucks which is known for a very dark roasted
coffee well beyond the second crack. This is what I call the fire engine
roast. That is just one step from being charcoal. Yeah, us coffee farmers
like to stick our nose in our air and look down at Starbucks. You know the
truth of the matter? So you want to know a secret? I drink Starbucks
coffee. But I don’t go to Starbucks for coffee, I go to Starbucks for what I
call the candy drink because that’s what they’re good at, right?
David: It’s like a 5000-calorie milkshake with some coffee.
Gary: Yeah, if I want chocolate and whip cream and all these other things
then Starbucks is great for that. If I want a cup of just good pure coffee,
then I don’t go to Starbucks, I go somewhere else. I have so much extra
coffee on the farm I don’t have to go very far. Actually, just yesterday we
had some friends over for dinner and a couple of days before that someone
had come to the farm for a tour and she gives tours of roasters in Portland.
She does a walking tour of several different coffee roasters and coffee
shops in Portland. So she was here on vacation and wanted to come by and
visit the coffee farm and she gave me a gift of a bag of coffee. So who
gives a coffee farmer a bag of coffee as a gift but it was actually fantastic
because I almost never drink anyone else’s coffee, I’m always drinking my
own coffee! So it was great to have this change. I don’t look at coffee as
good or bad. I mean there are a lot of things you can do wrong with it but
it’s like so many other products, everyone has different opinions. Some
people might like pineapple, other people are like, “no its way too acidic!”
but you don’t call it good or bad, it is just different preferences and it is
the same with coffee. I don’t like to refer to it as good or bad there are
different styles of coffee. So some people aren’t big fans of Kona coffee,
other people definitely are which justifies the price. If you’re not familiar
with Kona coffee, a bag of Kona coffee, a 1-pound bag of Kona coffee is
about 40 to 50 dollars. So it’s quite expensive compared to a can of
Folgers. You can get a 5-pound can of Folgers for about 5 dollars. So Kona
coffee in particular is very definitely a high end product. But the technique
for growing it is the same as everywhere. A big part of the price difference
for me is that my cost of labor is huge compared to a lot of other
countries, my cost of fertilizer, my cost of everything, so my expenses. I
wish that 40 to 50 dollar per pound was all profit but it definitely is not!
The vast majority of that is my expenses.
David: I can see that. I mean you’re basically up against third world labor
conditions while you’re trying to grow coffee in the most expensive state
in the union on some of the most expensive real estate. I mean it is not
easy.
Gary: You know, and that brings up a really good point too. A common
question I will get asked is “why don’t you grow other crops?” I was
actually with a farmer one day, this was several years ago, and I mentioned
off-hand that I was taking out my macadamia nut orchard. The farm used
to have a lot of macadamia nuts on it.
David: Oh man, I love those.
Gary: Yeah, and I still have some but I had like 5 acres worth and I was
taking it out and was going to plant coffee instead. And my thinking is that
I need to feed my family, right? I’m a professional coffee farmer. I need to
plant whatever crop is going to make me the most money which is very
different than a home gardener. Of course I need to temper that with still
taking care of the environment, taking care of the land, farming
responsibly. I hate having a monocrop but when it comes down to it at the
end of the day, Kona coffee I can farm profitably. A lot of other crops I
cannot farm profitably and since I’m trying to make a living off of it that
dictates my decision. This other “farmer” who is – I put farmer in quotes
there, because she was not farming to make a living – she owned a house
and then had what basically was a huge garden and some coffee trees in
the backyard and called herself a professional farmer. She was very upset
by the whole idea that I taking out my macadamia nuts. I agree with her
that I would like that diversification but due to the way the economy
works, I just can’t afford to grow a lot of other crops. It is kind of too bad
but that’s the way it works when it comes to making money. Now we do
have a large garden, we have chickens, I get a lot of wild pigs on the
property, wild pigs are a big problem in Hawaii but luckily they taste
delicious so you know there is a silver lining. We try to grow enough other
crops that we can feed, you know we have bananas, we have pineapples,
we have a lot of tropical fruits but very few of them will I grow
commercially. That is going to be a big difference between how I’m
growing coffee and how someone else might want to grow coffee.
David: Right, because you’ve got to watch your margins. That is like here
when somebody will ask me about growing different plants, you know, “do
you grow white potatoes?” and I’ll say, “well I don’t normally grow white
potatoes.” I play around with white potatoes because the amount of time
and effort it takes me to go into white potatoes is not worth the poor yields
in our climate that I often get with them. I would rather grow something
that takes less work and has a much larger yield, so I tell people to grow
something that has a high value. What is the most expensive thing you’re
eating? If it is possible to grow that in your yard, grow that! Don’t
necessarily grow zucchini because it is really easy to grow zucchini. If
you don’t like zucchini, it’s kind of ridiculous. You have to plant
something that is going to make some sort of economic sense or else then
you’re the person that is complaining in 4 or 5 years that “a garden never
pays for itself and I paid $8.00 for each tomato that I grew!” Well the
reason you paid $8.00 for each tomato is that tomatoes do not really grow
very well here. So you’ve got to work with market realities.
Gary: Exactly. We grow some lettuce, not because it is particularly fun to
grow but it is fast and we eat a lot of it so it makes sense for us. I have 5
avocado trees on the farm, beautiful avocados, delicious avocados, that’s
more than I need for the household but it’s not enough to sell
commercially, so it is kind of a waste there. I don’t need all 5 trees; I mean
it doesn’t do much harm I have the space for them. I have in the past tried
picking a bunch of them and selling them at a farmer’s market but that
turned out to just not be worth the effort when I actually backed up and did
the math on that. If I was spending all day doing this for the fun of it,
yeah, it made sense, but when I’m trying to make a living then it didn’t
make so much sense. I sold them to the local wholesaler who what we call
farm gate price, so I’m not even getting wholesale price. I’m one step
below that, that wholesaler would then turn around and sell them to Costco
or other accounts. At that level, I made a couple of hundred bucks a day so
if I had an off day where I wasn’t busy with coffee or other things, it was
worth it. Trying to make a full time living with the whole family doing
that doesn’t pay for itself. That is a big problem with commercial farming
and that’s why there are so few family farms remaining in the country, I
feel like, because in order to remain profitable you have to look at this
bottom line which turns the farms into these giant factory places, most
modern farms are really just outdoor factories
David: And people get very upset by that and then they’ll say “well,
you’ve got to look at so and so’s farm because so and so does it all
sustainably” and you know, fill in the blank, but then you look and you say
well, so and so sells $1200.00 courses and so and so is selling an
experience on the farm not just directly producing something to try and
feed a family in an artificially manipulated price of food environment and
dealing with huge amounts of regulations and everything. I mean, even
here you can make a certain amount of money in Florida off of your
property if you’re zoned agricultural and sell it because there is a “right to
farm” act and it protects some small farmers from certain regulations but
once you get into, like, above the poverty line level suddenly there is a
whole new round of regulations. Even if you grew everything organically,
if you want to say that you grew it organically, well you are going to get in
trouble because you have to be “certified organic” to even use the term
and then you’ve got the city, the county, the state, the federal government
and like 15 different agencies all the time. You pretty much just can’t do it
part time and make much money. You can do a market garden to maybe
pay for your kid’s soccer practice or something but it’s a tough line. Once
you get to the point where you’ve actually got to make money, it is tough.
Gary: Once you get to that point you start competing with the
professionals, right, you start competing and the professionals have some
advantages in that often they are better funded. They have full-time
employees so they can put more time and effort into it. They can do things
like I have, I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I have had to spend time with
the state legislature with lawmakers going over different rules because we
do get a lot of part-time farms here in Kona, we have a lot of abandoned
farms and they can be a big problem for people that are trying to grow
coffee especially commercially, because imagine if you had some
beautiful tomato garden and then your next-door neighbor had an
abandoned tomato garden and that brought in all the pests from the whole
county into that garden and they just come right across your fence, right?
It is difficult to deal with that. If you go to a lot of parts of the country like
you’re saying and you try to grow a farm and you don’t do it what they
consider correctly, someone will knock on your door and you’ve got to fix
this or else we're chopping it all down and charging you for it!
David: Yes.
Gary: So yeah, once you get to the level where you’re beyond a garden
and into the farming then there are a lot more rules. I agree with some of
the rules. I like the idea, you know, I want people to farm responsibly. At
the same time, I don’t feel that the government does a particularly good
job of telling me how to farm responsibly. So there’s a hard line in
between the two of how do you get everyone to do things the correct way
without having the government breathe down your necks.
David: Yeah, in Florida the big issue here is the citrus groves. There are a
lot of abandoned citrus groves that have held all kinds of pests. So when a
pest comes through you know it jumps, and jumps, and jumps and jumps
to the point where I’m telling people you know don’t even plant a citrus
tree there are so many diseases and problems. It used to be one of the
easiest trees to grow and now it’s one of the biggest pains in the neck,
you’re probably going to lose it in the next 4 to 5 years to one or another
disease, probably greening will take it before anything else does and you
can’t do anything about it. It’s just too much monoculture for too long.
Now, I have heard that coffee can work as an understory crop in a multi-
crop system and one of the things I was looking at is the potential for
possibly growing cocoa with coffee as an understory and perhaps vanilla
orchids actually supported on the cocoa trees. I mean is that insane or is
that a good idea?
Gary: Coffee does grow naturally as an understory plant, the big caveat
there is when it grows in its natural environment it doesn’t produce a
whole lot of fruit. So if you’re after the coffee bean, if you’re after your
morning cup of coffee, you don’t want that naturally growing coffee plant
because it doesn’t naturally produce a whole cup of coffee. You have to
modify the environment a little bit to get everything perfect. You know it’s
kind of like a professional athlete. Humans don’t naturally run marathons,
you have to train for it, right? You have to be in just the right condition,
you have to eat right, you have to be prepared for it and it’s the same with
that coffee tree if you’re after that professional level, that athletic level,
that higher level production, then you need to modify a few things. So it
does naturally grow well as an understory plant and if you’re in the tropics
where it is extremely hot outside, then you want some form of shade
grown coffee. Shade grown coffee is a big deal for two reasons: first of all,
right on the tropics the shade grown coffee: if you grow the coffee out in
the sun it’s not going to do well, that’s too much sun, right? It’s like
Goldilocks: it wants some sun but not too much sun and then the other
issue with the shade grown is it’s better for the environment to have that
multi-story. That’s how the jungle naturally is. So if you can, rather than
chopping down acres and acres worth of jungle, it would be great to leave
some of the larger trees behind so that you still can support the bird
population and a lot of the other native plants and animals that live there
because coffee will grow in that understory. Here in Kona, at my elevation,
I have a lot of cloud cover, almost every afternoon we’ll get clouds and
rain and the coffee loves all of that water and the cooler weather from the
clouds, but if I combine both the clouds and the heavy jungle, you know
the larger trees, that would be too much shade. So there’s a fine line there
and it really depends on your climate, you know if you’re growing it in a
greenhouse or something, yeah, you’re going to have to decide where
you're growing that coffee tree and listen to the tree and do what it wants.
David: Yeah, I’ve had to take mine into half shade here because in the
summer it is 95 to 100 degrees regularly for a month, two months, three
months sometimes it’ll get up into the 90s and it is just the most nasty
western sun. By the time it gets to the afternoon, the coffee plant would be
leaning, you know, all the leaves dropping, always thirsty and sad, so I
realized after a while I had to put it in some shade at least but I’ve been
up, I was in the Caribbean at about an elevation of maybe 2500 feet or so
and I noticed that when you got up there the clouds just hung around a lot
and everything was cool and moist and that isn’t particularly good for
fruits set on most trees in general, they do need the sunshine to get the
fruit. I could see, you’d probably, I guess you’d want to experiment with
multi-species growing if it was possible in an environment that perhaps
isn’t ideal for just the coffee plant like where you are.
Gary: Yeah, that’s I mean that’s a good point. I get up the mountain here
in that cooler weather under the clouds, that’s great for coffee but some
other fruit like mangos don’t do so well up here. They want that hotter,
more humid, down by the ocean. You can never get the perfect
environment for every plant and it’s got to be a compromise.
David: So tell me: do you grow the coffee starting from seed and then just
plant them out or do they do they graft them like they do with improved
varieties? If they selected varieties of coffee and said, “hey this is the one,
you know, this is Jim’s extra big or whatever,” are there strains of coffee
that have been bred and then grafted repeatedly or is it still a seedling
grown type of an operation?
Gary: Both. The main type of coffee that almost everybody drinks, is
called Arabica, right? We’ve all heard the word Arabica. And then the
second most popular is Robusta. Robusta is a heartier tree, they’re both
coffee, but it’s a heartier tree that tends to grow in places like Africa with
a harsher climate. It is considered cheaper, it’s often used as a filler coffee,
most people won’t drink Robusta straight but big brand names will use
Robusta because it’s a cheaper coffee so they’ll use that along with
Arabica to make a blend. Here in Kona it’s almost all Arabica coffee. Now
out of Arabica there are a lot of different strains. I’m growing what we call
“Kona Typica” which originally came from Guatemala but there are some
that, like I mentioned, I got that bag of coffee a gift the other day. That
was a “Bourbon” which was a different strain of coffee. There is a lot of
different strains. Arabica, Robusta, I actually have a third type of coffee
growing on my farm called Liberica, nobody drinks that coffee. I don’t
know how it tastes, I’ve never even tried it but I suspect it tastes like dirt.
It doesn’t make very good coffee, what it does do it’s a very strong tree so
I’ll use it as root stock. I’ll take some seeds from that tree and then as a
little baby seedling cut the tops off and then take an Arabica seedling and
graft them together and you’ve got to sit there with your magnifying glass
and your sterile environment and little tiny clips and then for on the farm
I’ll do hundreds to thousands of those so we can go out and plant them. So
there is some grafting that is done, but for the most part, I have done some
grafting and in the problem areas I’ll plant the grafted tree but most of the
farm the coffee grows great so I don’t have to bother with the grafting. In
fact, I had another farmer come ask me once, “oh my coffee trees are sick,
what do I do about this? How do it fix it?” you know, it has this problem or
that problem, how do I fix it? My answer was rip it out and plant a new
one because as a coffee farmer I’m looking the larger scale of thousands
of trees so I don’t have the time to baby them back to health. If it’s a weak
tree, you know, like that weak member, that weak athlete on your football
team, sorry I don’t have time – you’re going to be cut from the team,
we’re going to bring a stronger one.
David: Yeah, it would be like Donald Trump taking the day off and
figuring he would just kind of fix the door on his house... you don’t have
time for that! You’ve got other stuff you have to do.
Gary: Exactly, exactly. Which actually puts me at kind of a disadvantage
giving advice to the home grower because I don’t know a lot of those
questions. If I see a sick tree, I don’t know. I mean some of the common
stuff: scale or something which is a common issue with a lot greenhouse
grown trees and that’s something that homeowners might see is scale on
the tree, which same as a lot of other plants is due to the ants, right,
because the ants are harvesting it, keep the ants away you’ll keep the mold
off, you’ll have a healthier tree. So there’s some issues but mostly it
comes down to getting all the variables right of good sun, good soil, plenty
of water, plenty of drainage, and that’s a big difference that I can tell on
my farm. So this year we had a pretty heavy drought and a lot of the other
farms in the area, the trees were starting to look really yellow and weak,
and mine were still staying green and people were like “well, what magic
did you do to keep your trees so healthy?” The answer is years and years
of soil management where I will test the soil and see what’s in the soil and
then fertilize according to what the soil needs and not what it doesn’t need.
David: Yes.
Gary: Right, and that’s an important part of gardening or anything is you
can’t just plant it, you have to figure out what that specific plant wants and
get the soil balance for that.
David: That’s actually a point that garden writer Steve Solomon points out
in his book The Intelligent Gardener. He says that a lot of people are just
throwing on 10-10-10, year after year after year, and he says meanwhile
the phosphorous levels in their soil may be building up way beyond what
the plant needs. It may not be getting enough nitrogen or the plant might
be getting too much potassium and he says these people just continuously
fertilize like it's magic, just throwing it around, and he said with the
proper soil testing through a laboratory he says you can figure out “wow,
I’m short on molybdenum!” You can know if you're short on boron or
short on copper and can tweak. Solomon says your plants can only grow as
well as the final piece that they’re missing, like if they’re missing calcium
they can only grow up to a certain point before that calcium deficiency
slows them down or causes problems.
Gary: That weakest link.
David: Yeah, the weakest link. So he says, you know, you fill in all those
gaps and also you feed the soil not the plant. People don’t pay any
attention to their soil most of the time other than to say “it’s bad” and then
they go buy some bags of topsoil and fake compost and shredded wood
chips that’s called topsoil and then dump it in their garden and think that
that is going to fix it. It’s kind of gratifying that you could look and see
that all your investment in the soil was paying off on your coffee farm.
That's an investment nobody ever looks at – the dirt! But when you see
that you’ve got the green trees and everybody else doesn’t, that’s very
validating.
Gary: It is, it pays off, it makes me feel very proud of myself. That triple
16, or you said triple 10, or MiracleGro(TM) is a good example. It’s a
broad spectrum because they don’t know what plant you’re fertilizing so
they just try to meet a little bit of everything. A previous owner of my
farm for years had thrown what we call triple 16, which is nitrogen,
phosphorous, potassium all balanced and that phosphorus builds up over
time and when I started testing my soil I was like “holy moly, I have far
too much phosphorous here!” so I had to go to a more expensive fertilizer
that had zero phosphorous. That is something I actually could not have
done if I wanted to be organic because the definition of organic when it
comes to farming is no synthetic input and in order to get this fertilizer
that brought the soil back into balance, I had to use a synthetic fertilizer
that had zero percent phosphorous but still plenty of nitrogen and
potassium. By taking those soil samples I could target exactly what I
needed and bring that soil back into balance. Another trick I’ll do – I'll
share this is three levels – on the easiest level it’s testing the pH because
that definitely makes the biggest difference and you can get a cheap pH
tester from Home Depot or wherever to test your soil. Then the next step is
I’ll take soil samples, ship them off to a lab, and they’ll come back and
tell me what the soil has and doesn’t have. Then the final step is a leaf
analysis because with those micronutrients sometimes you’ll get
something a little bit wrong and the soil might be very well balanced but
nutrients for some reason are not getting up into the tree and you can look
at that leaf analysis and see what it is missing to get the full picture. It is
not just what’s in the soil, it is what the tree is pulling out of it. For
example, too much, I may have the chemistry wrong on this, but too much
phosphorous can lock up the iron and put the tree into an iron deficiency.
Yeah, I might have that chemistry wrong, but something like that. The
point is that it is easy to get a particular deficiency.
David: I’m familiar with the leaf testing. I have a friend who was running
an organic blueberry farm up in Tennessee and I had asked him about how
he made sure that everything was balanced because his soil wasn’t ideal
for blueberries so he had to redo a lot to make it happen but blueberry
demand was very high so he figured he was going to redo his soil. He
trenched in a lot of rotten pine bark and that sort of thing but he was doing
leaf analysis tests. Something else I discovered was that you can find out
from the leaves what’s there, and you can find out from the soil what’s,
there but the reason that sometimes the plants can’t take up the nutrition –
maybe all the nutrition is there but it’s bound up like you said because the
plant is missing something else – or it's bound up because the pH is not
correct. I have a tangerine tree in my front yard next to the lime rock
driveway and that tree is always showing deficiency issues despite the fact
that it is in rich loamy soil. That's because the pH keeps creeping up from
the lime washing off of the road. The tree bears fine and looks pretty good
but people are always going “man what’s wrong with this thing? I said,
“well it gets fertilizer but it can’t always take it up.” I actually would have
to add more sulfur to get the sulfur bacteria to chew it down, make some
acid, and lower the pH but that’s only temporary because the alkaline is
always coming back.
Gary: Yeah, and even though pH is important it’s a difficult thing to deal
with because it takes years for that to move through the soil as opposed to
something like nitrogen which I compare to a fast sugar rush, right? You
put that nitrogen on the trees and it just makes them go crazy for a little
while but it nitrogen can sublimate real easy, it comes back out of the soil
really easy where lime can take a long time to bring it back into balance.
I’ve seen the opposite where I, because our soil tends to be lower pH, very
acidic, and sometimes it can get too low, too acidic, and an area where a
bunch of lime was spilled onto the ground by accident and cleaned it up
but there’s still enough left there that over the years those trees are as
happy as can be.
David: Yeah, that lime sticks around for a long time. If you put too much
lime on your garden, you can destroy it for years.
Gary: Absolutely, absolutely.
David: As an experiment, I planted a little coffee seedling next to the back
wall of my house because we sometimes get as many as 10 to 15 freezes
over the course of the winter here, so if I grew coffee out in my yard it
would be dead. But I found that up against the back wall of my house is a
microclimate and it’s like Miami and nothing freezes right next to the
wall, so I planted guavas, key lime, a little coffee, I planted black pepper,
longevity spinach, lemons, all kinds of things like in a really tight row
along the back of the house and that little coffee plant has totally loved it
back there right next to the wall but I’ve been feeding it coffee grounds, so
it’s very happy, but I’m afraid I may have introduced it to cannibalism. I
don’t know if that’s going to be a long term problem for the coffee
psychologically or not.
Gary: Yeah, I don’t know, I bet the tree is pretty happy with that just
getting that pH back down getting that acid into the soil, especially in your
soil.
David: My guess was between the acidity plus the fact that the beans have
everything that a little coffee sprout needs to live, I thought well probably
that would be good.
Gary: Well maybe you're teaching the tree, you're like, “see these coffee
grounds? That’s what I want, do this!”
David: Make these!
Gary: Yes. That’s not a bad idea. I have a neighbor across the street. He
farms very differently than I do which you know is great. I love the fact
that there’s so many farms in the area and we all grow differently. One day
we were out planting. I had a field of coffee, a whole field where I was
planting new coffee trees and he was the same way. I had gone through all
this effort to get the most beautiful little young trees I had and they were
perfectly timed, I had the soil mixed just right for each hole, I dug all the
holes and he came out with a stick, made a little hole, put the coffee tree
into it and then immediately ripped all the branches off the tree so it
looked like nothing but a little twig sticking out of the ground, and I was
like “Manny what are you doing, there’s no way those are going to grow!”
He gave me a long lecture on how I was planting at the wrong time
because I hadn’t consulted the moon and this month’s moon was upset
with the previous month’s moon and they were having an argument and I
couldn’t plant until next month or something. I couldn’t understand
exactly what he was going on about. I was like, “well obviously I know
how to farm and he doesn’t” ...and a year later his trees were beautiful and
mine were still struggling. So you know, sometimes being able to talk to
the tree, being able to understand what it wants, that counts for something.
David: Yeah, and there’s really nothing like observation. People think that
doctors were idiots back in the 12 or 13 hundreds – but they didn’t have
microscopes, they didn’t have a lot of modern diagnostic equipment and
they were actually pretty good at keeping people from dying at some
points. You know, they actually found things out that worked and then
found some things that didn’t work. Plants were the same way. People
didn’t know anything about genetics but they figured this plant has better
fruit so I’m going to plant the seeds from that, and that plant doesn’t have
very good fruit so I’m going to graft on top of it, and in doing they
developed incredible beautiful things. Whether or not it was the moon
fighting over it or a scientific lab test coming back and saying you don’t
have the right soil at this time, the observation is really a big thing.
Gary: Exactly. We both just had different ways of saying kind of the same
thing. I’m like, “oh the phosphorous uptake isn’t correct” and he was “no
the moon, the phase of the moon is up.” What we’re both saying is that
this tree isn’t quite right, we need to change something and you know I
think that’s a point I feel like I keep coming back to here is when growing,
especially a commercial farm, but even just a garden, a coffee tree in
Florida, whatever you happen to be doing I think it is important to
remember that you’ve pushed nature out of balance, you’re asking nature
to do something that it wouldn’t normally do all on its own, right? Nature
wouldn’t normally have a garden full of tomato plants. Someone chopped
down the jungle and planted a whole bunch of coffee, that pushed nature
out of balance. I feel like it is my job to try to keep nature as in balance as
I can, or bring it back to balance as much as I possibly can while still
growing this coffee. So I have to kind of hold things, I have to actively
work to hold the soil in balance. Here’s another example of that: where did
the coffee come from? That seed is a lot of material, where did all those
atoms, where did all that material come from? It is taking nutrients out of
the ground and then I am taking those nutrients off of the farm and selling
them. I have to replace that. I have to every year figure I took this much
nutrition out of the soil, I have to put it back. I have pushed nature back
this far, I have to hold it back a little bit but also bring as much as I can
back to the farm. I have a thick layer of grass between all my trees which
is really important because that holds in all that biomass underneath, it
holds the soil in place, it holds all the bugs in place, so I want that nature
as present as I can possibly get it and the reason for grass is because I can
mow it and mowing is far better than spraying some kind of chemical to
stop it, being out there for hours and hours with a weed whacker, so that
grass works perfectly because it holds this great biomass down underneath
that the roots of the tree really need and love yet me as a farmer the most
efficient way that I can keep that while still having my farm as well.
David: That makes a lot of sense. In Florida what people do here is they
cut down the trees and they clear a lot and they build a house you know or
the construction company does it and they build a development and they
plant a couple of shrubs and they have a great big lawn and they are doing
this on very sandy, poor soil. As soon as you take out the forest here, the
soil is highly leaching and not very pH balanced and it is very difficult to
really grow grass properly on it. They take out the natural ecosystem, they
put a house on it and a lawn, and then I said you know people are having to
play grazing animals by grazing the front lawn with a lawnmower and then
throwing around fertilizer like manure because they have taken out the
checks and balances that are normally there. There is no buffalo to keep
the grass in shape and there is no forest to hold in the biomass and to keep
the ground from being beaten and leached and always, it’s always
replenishing itself with humus, and you're right. I mean, you take out the
original system and you’re always going to have to play God. You know,
every little piece you take out if you wanted to get rid of the grass, the
stuff wants to fit into every little niche, if you didn’t have grass there
weeds would grow into it or creepers would get into it or the jungle would
replant itself. Some of the old seed bank might start coming back and you
know if you walk away from your coffee farm, you don’t have anything,
the coffee is going to choke out and be covered in creepers in a few years
probably and eventually it is going to revert to whatever the natural
ecosystem was. That's the way it works.
Gary: It is. I was working with, I won’t name them, but a government
agency that was concerning themselves with farming and basically coming
and telling me how to farm and on the ground cover in between. They were
very interested in ground cover and keeping the topsoil, which is perfect,
fantastic. I love the fact that they’re concerned with keeping that topsoil
there. The problem is they came in and they said “okay, we want you to
plant these types of ground cover” and they had a whole list of plants.
Okay, choose from these plants. Earlier I called it grass, but it’s really kind
of mowed weeds and what I mean by this is it is what is growing here
naturally and growing here best for those specific conditions and that is
what I let propagate as the ground cover. I will go on an actively manage it
and try to remove the weeds that don’t belong here, but they didn’t like
that, they didn’t like the fact that I was calling it mowed weeds. They
wanted a very specific list and I looked at some of the things on their list
and it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense and so looking at the
environment, trying to decide to work with it instead of against it, yeah, it
is a very important thing to do whether gardening or farming.
David: Before I wrap this thing up, I want to know: how did you first
decide “I’m going to go into coffee farming” of all things? I mean, that’s
like a dream for some people, I’m going to just walk away and become a
coffee farmer.
Gary: So I was sitting in my office job, feeling frustrated because
spending day after day locked in some, you know that’s the way I felt,
locked inside some cubicle in an office building with windows that didn’t
even open and it was a beautiful spring day, kind of like it is today, and I
looked out the window and down below, I was up on the third floor, down
below there was a crew pouring concrete. I realized that I would rather be
out with them all sweaty and dirty and tired rather than upstairs sitting
inside my air conditioned cubicle and that’s when I realized, wait a second,
life is too short. It is great to earn money, but it is also great to do
something you love something you enjoy, and at this point I had no idea
about coffee farming or anything else but I knew I needed to make a
change. I walked into HR and I told them I quit. They said, “well we need
it in writing,” and so I took a post-it note and wrote “I quit.” I do not
advise this, I am not advising others to that, because then I spent several
months unemployed and during that whole time I’m like, I don’t know
what I’m going to do next. I had pretty much decided I didn’t want to live
in the city any more. I had for years actually been interested in farming
but it is a difficult thing to get into unless your family owns land already
or you have a large corporate farm or something else. There are very few
family farms left. There’s some here and there but it is very difficult to
make a living full time as a farmer anymore. Then I happened to stumble
across this idea of Kona coffee. I was like... that could actually work and
at first I was like, no I’m not dumb enough to do that, you know, I can
make far more money over here instead of that silly coffee farming stuff
but the idea just wouldn’t leave. It just stuck with me and I couldn’t shake
that idea and then one thing lead to another and I ended up buying a coffee
farm. It was definitely an uphill battle. The first many years I really had
no idea what I was doing. There were all sorts of mistakes. One of my first
days on the farm, I got the tractor stuck and I accidentally drove it through
the electric fence and that is not something you want to do drive your
tractor through your electric fence. Not only does it break the fence, it also
is not so good on the tractor. So I had a bit of a learning curve but I was
never shy about talking to other farmers. Anytime I would see someone
out doing something I would pull over to the side of the road, walk up, and
say “hey buddy, what are you doing?” and try to learn that way. The
university had some good material on it. The university has an extension
office here. I got involved with other farmer organizations in town. So
slowly but surely I kind of learned my way. It is definitely a difficult way
of life. It has to be something that you’re doing because you love it, not
because you’re trying to make money. I have managed to make a living
from it but if I was out to make money, I’d go back to that office building.
Farming is a difficult but very rewarding way of life. I have no regrets,
I’m glad I made the decision. It hasn’t been easy but I’ve been happy with
it.
David: That’s awesome. That’s a great story too. I think that is the way
that things get done. You can either worry about risk management all the
time or do things. People have told me, “I want to start my own business.
Dave you started your own business, you know, how did you do it? I said,
“well I basically ditched everything and worked my tail off for a few years
until things kind of worked.” They said “what do you do for health
insurance?” I said, “I don’t have any health insurance.” “Well I couldn’t
live without health insurance,” they'll say. I was like, well then you’ve got
to figure out how to pay the 1000.00 a month for health insurance. You
have to take the risk. They’ll say well, what about this and what about this
and I said, “first of all why don’t you save six months’ worth of income. If
you can actually save six months’ worth of income, at that point you’ve
got six months to float before you crash. Try that or just quit.” I mean, it is
better to just dive headfirst into it than to spend your entire life worrying
about what you could have done and counting every penny and thinking
“what happens if I break my arm and I don’t have health insurance?” Well,
you pay 50.00 a month for the next 100 years, I mean it is not that big a
deal. You can live in your job or you can be out farming coffee and doing
that you love.
Gary: Absolutely. I was pretty lucky in that I had two years, according to
my math in my head, I had two years’ worth of income, so I had a two-
year window where I could learn something new. Now that may sound like
a lot because I understand a lot of people don’t have two years’ worth of
savings saved up.
David: Or two day's worth of savings.
Gary: Even with two years’ worth of savings, I knew the farm was going
to take me about 5 years. That was my plan when I started. Now really, it
took about 7 years before I got to the point where I was like okay, now I’m
comfortable with it. So, there’s risk no matter what level you're coming
into it and you’ve got to weigh that against the reward and I made the
decision. I was like, okay, this is something I’m confident that I can do. I
might fail, there is a very good chance but I’m going to give it a try. I
remember those first couple of years and there were nights... there was one
day where I came in from the farm and I was taking a shower right before
dinner because I was just filthy from working outside all day and while
waiting for the, I remember turning the shower on waiting for the water to
heat up, and the next thing I remember is my wife waking me up because I
had laid down on the floor just for a second and apparently I had been
laying there for like 15 to 20 minutes just because I was so tired. So yeah,
there is definitely some hard work involved but it’s all risk, I do not advise
it for everybody. Same as going into the military, it can be great for some
people, for other people it is absolutely the wrong decision.
David: Yes. You just bought the land and planted the coffee right? I mean
did you start from scratch?
Gary: There was a little bit of coffee on the farm. So there was already a
house here, there was a little bit of coffee. I planted far more coffee and
then I built the barn and all my processing facilities and started the brand.
None of that was here when I started. In that sense I started from scratch
but not completely, like it wasn’t jungle, it wasn’t raw land. Before me it
was all macadamia nuts, before that it had been sheep, so the land had
been used for agricultural purposes which did give me a head start.
David: Wow, that’s serious. Where can we find you online and read your
articles and all that?
Gary: Yeah, [Link]. Kona Earth is my brand. That’s where you
can buy coffee and I do actually have a pretty extensive blog on there.
Now I have to mention that I don’t keep up with the blog posts as much as
I used to. There are a lot of blog posts that show our first few days on the
farm which are really kind of the most interesting times I think because
everything was new and different and a big challenge. Nowadays I am like,
what do I do post? Another, “yeah, I’m picking coffee again?” You know,
it’s hard for me to be excited about it because I’ve seen it all so much now.
So that information is there, it is just not necessarily recent until I get a
really interesting article about some survivalist gardener dude talking
about coffee.
David: Then you’ve got to set them straight.
Gary: Then I get excited. So yeah, there’s information there.
[Link].
David: That’s great, thank you very much, Gary. I really appreciate you
taking the time and just making it happen.
Gary: Yeah, and I appreciate your information too. My wife has read your
book, she has a copy of it. I’m going to get busy with it here. I haven’t, it
is hard for me to get time to read it, but it’s on the top of my list here.
David: Well last thing, it’s: cherry stage, parchment stage, green bean
stage, and then roasted coffee?
Gary: Roasted, you’ve got it, all four stages.
David: Alright, good. One of these days I’m going to go through all the
stages myself and I will probably call you crying in the middle of the night
because I messed something up.
Gary: And you know what, that will probably be the best cup of coffee
you’ve ever had.
David: I’m sure it will be. I will catch up with you in the future and thank
you very much.
Gary: Yeah, good talking to you. Thank you.
 Other Books by David The Good
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To Growing Piles of Food in the Sunshine State

Are you tired of failing at your Florida gardening? Are stink bugs
ravishing your tomatoes and nematodes gnawing at your eggplants? Is the
sand eating your compost like an RV swallows gas?

Fear not. You CAN grow buckets upon buckets of food in Florida—and
this book gives you the secrets to pulling it off year after year. Lots more
food—for a lot less work!

Whether you want to save money, feed your family, start a survival garden,
garden year-round, go paleo or build a huge prepper garden, this is the
book for you.

Learn the cheap simple techniques that will kickstart your Florida
gardening. Discover the crops that will always come through for you. Quit
hating the sand and the bugs and start reaping abundant harvests like
you've never had before! This book provides the answers for both
beginners and experts, delivered with humor. If you want yet another
boring gardening book—this isn't it. Through combining Back to Eden
gardening, Square Foot Gardening, Biointensive gardening, container
gardening and some of the most productive crops on the planet, you WILL
succeed! This is easy Florida gardening like you've never seen before. Pick
up a copy of Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening and turn your backyard
patch of weeds and sand into a money-saving vegetable factory that will
keep your family fed no matter what the economy does. Start gardening
RIGHT NOW before it's too late!

Expert Florida gardener David The Good shares how in Totally Crazy Easy
Florida Gardening.

Sample Reviews:

"I really like this book. Loads of good information for the Florida
newcomer as well as the seasoned gardener." -Craig

"This book gives hope to us, the "purple thumb" people that we can have a
successful garden in Florida. My problem was that my few gardening
skills came from my Dad who gardened up north. I have been using the
wrong skills for the wrong crops." -Suzanne Cannon

"This is an essential read if you are going to grow food in Florida or

anywhere in the tropics or subtropics of the world. In fact all of his
techniques on soil prep and amendment, random planting and pest control
can be applied anywhere except maybe Antarctica. Thank You David for
sharing with the world your successes and failures of gardening in
Florida. I highly recommend this book, his blog and his other books too." -
Hans C.

Buy Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening at this link!

Also – be sure to check out The Survival Gardener's Guide to Growing

Tobacco, which can be found here: [Link]