Southerners Eye Sustainable Coffee Growing

[sabaijai]

Awake to smell the coffee

With coaching in sustainable agriculture from Nestle, southern growers are at last turning a profit and doing nature a favour too

Published on October 29, 2007

To coffee grower Worajan Buranok, "sustainable agriculture" means optimising the use of available resources rather than being reliant on outside supplies - and living debt-free.

He and other farmers had been lectured on the concept at government seminars over the years. Then they were given free seeds. Not much changed.

It was only with the launch of a campaign sponsored by Nestle (Thai) Ltd that the real meaning of the term sank in, says Worajan, 32.

He and his fellow coffee growers in Chumphon, Ranong, Surat Thani and Krabi attended training sessions and learned, for example, about using the pulp and other residue from their coffee mills to make organic fertiliser instead of simply burning it.

Put into practice, the idea vastly reduced their use of chemical fertilisers. Worajan's family had been going through 80 sacks of the stuff a year, at Bt700 per sack. Now he needs about 30.

Worajan and the others also started growing herbs and vegetables between the rows of coffee shrubs. They soon had more than they needed, and Nestle suggested they form a collective to produce and sell packages of instant-soup spices.

Then Worajan arranged to collect dung from nearby pig farms to use as fertiliser, and kept better track of his cash flow so he could see where expenditures might be trimmed.

"I'm debt-free now and I'm saving money," he says, showing off the farm account book, where there are tens of thousands of baht earmarked for his children's education.

Worajan's experience has taught him that farmers shouldn't blindly follow the example of others, such as when one grower discovers that palm oil is profitable and everyone else starts growing palm trees.

He has rubber and palm trees as well as his coffee plantation to ensure there is income all year round and guard against disaster should any of the crops fail.

Worajan is proud of what he's achieved - he's come much further than his parents.

They migrated south from Buri Ram to Tambon Huai Sai Ngam in Ranong's Kraburi district and worked hard until they could buy some land. For more than 20 years they grew coffee, but most of the money was spent paying employees, buying fertiliser and covering other expenses.

They never saved much, and if the price of coffee plunged they ended up deep in financial trouble.

Wijit Jaicheun, 62, farms at Ban Chong Bon in Chumphon's Sawi district, and he too found the training programme a boon.

Between his rows of coffee he now has palm, rubber and banana trees and bushes full of beans and herbs. The bean plants give the soil extra nitrogen, which cuts down on the weeds that used to choke the coffee shrubs. Wijit, a native of Lop Buri who came to work on the coffee plantations in 1986, now uses only organic pesticide as well.

Harvest at the 60-rai farm requires seven family members and a squad of hired hands, he says, and a lot of coffee farmers come to study the reasons for his success.

"My health has improved a lot too because the plantation is chemical-free," he says. "I used to spray the weeds with chemicals, but now the other crop plants keep the weeds away.

"And I'm nearly debt-free. I owe a little [to the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives] because my family will only be entitled to benefits when I die if I'm a client there."

Both Worajan and Wijit are grateful to Nestle, which introduced the training a decade ago as part of its corporate social-responsibility programme.

Nestle, of course, wanted better coffee beans as well, as it readily admits. With the age-old techniques growers were using, output was low and quality could be improved. Showing them new methods would benefit everyone.

"Our Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Nestle takes into consideration long-term returns by focusing on environmentally friendly agriculture," says the company's agronomist manager, Tarit Kunasol, referring to the training project known as SAIN.

"There's a plan for long-term resource management together with environmental conservation - forests, soil, water, air and energy. At the same time, farmers need to be educated about effective farm and labour management and community participation, all of which corresponds to His Majesty the King's philosophy of a sufficiency economy."

The farmers were early on given a specific strain of coffee seedlings that promised to improve things, but it took years to convince them to change their growing methods.

"It's not easy changing farmers' attitudes," Tarit says. "Our team dedicated a great deal of time to the project. But they had immense patience and managed to convey the know-how and innovations.

"It was worth all the effort, though, because sustainable agriculture will bring the farmers a better quality of life. They'll have lower production cost thanks to huge, quality yields, and this will be the basis for products of international standard."

Tarit says the next steps would be to make biogas from animal dung for use in the farmers' homes and to use earthworms to make fertiliser.

"Ultimately," adds Tai Hwan Kim, Nestle's executive director for manufacturing, "we're hoping to see sustainable agriculture based on the sufficiency-economy principle. But this can only be realised with the help of both the private and public sectors in promoting farming as a career that can in turn attain a true level of sustainable agriculture."

Chularat Saengpassa

The Nation

Ranong