Time Will Tell

Time Will Tell was Originally Posted on September 23, 2013 by lavarock

Just the other day I got half the orchard mowed. It had taken months to get to it because of daily rain. When I DID get started, I got the tractor stuck as it started sliding down into a gulley and I needed help to get it out. I’ll put police tape in that area to ensure I don’t make the same mistake again.

I am also drying more parchment and should be able to get more coffee processed soon. I also am doing a bit of local roasting for a couple small orders I have. Soon I’ll take a big bag of beans up to the big roaster in town and let them have at it.

I have to decide if I will build a temporary drying deck now, or wait until the end of the year and get a larger one built. The larger one would allow me to more efficiently dry the beans. This last picking I got backed up and almost had to take the just pulped beans down somewhere else and pay someone to pulp and dry them for me. Think of 3 conveyor belts all working at the same time. You have coffee cherry just picked that needs to be pulped. Then you have pulped beans rinsing and sitting to remove the sweet mucilage covering. Then you have beans drying on a deck. If you get lots of rain and the beans don’t dry fast enough, you can’t dump the wet, soaked beans out to dry. They also can’t sit for long as they are. Also, if you have all your containers filled with soaking beans, you have no place to put the pulped beans and they can’t be pulped until you have a place to soak them. You also can’t leave the picked cherry for any length of time because they must be processed within hours of picking. It is an orchestrated dance that larger operations might not have. In my case, think Lucy and Ethel with 3 candy conveyor belts!

With a big, covered drying deck, I can dry all the beans I want. Having more soaking containers is not a problem as long as I have a place to put the beans afterwards. Also, I can pulp hundreds of pounds of cherry in a few hours. That is the easy part as I have a motor on the pulper and it does most of the work for me. I just keep feeding material in. If I really needed to, I could create a more automated way to continuously feed material in and take the spent cherry covering and beans out. In my case, that is not necessary as I only have so many trees.

I do have a thought. Some of my neighbors do not process their own coffee and just sell it as cherry. Some of that ends up making someone else lots of money. With a large enough deck and a second or larger pulper I could be processing my neighbors coffee for a fee (or just buying their coffee and offering it on my website as another brand). I am not looking to become a big organization, however it is also a way to look out to ensure I have income in the future.

I am still considering getting the downstairs room fixed up for someone where I can trade a room for farm help. That would allow me to have an unused room filled with someone who would pulp and dry the extra coffee, which brings me a bit of income. It could work out, time will tell.