How coffee cherries are grown and harvested

A coffee bean is the seed of a red fruit, and the fruit must be picked at peak ripeness or the flavor suffers.

stations: 3
things downstream: 5

The short version

Coffee grows as shrubs between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Seedlings are raised in a nursery for six to twelve months before being planted out. The berries are either picked selectively by hand at peak ripeness or strip-picked all at once, by people or machines, regardless of ripeness.

Nurse the seedlings

In Brazil seedlings are raised in nurseries and moved to the field after six to twelve months. The traditional alternative is to drop 20 seeds into each hole at the start of the rains, which wastes about half of them because they fail to sprout.
Intercrop in the early years

In the first few years, while farmers learn what the plants need, coffee is often grown between food crops such as corn, beans or rice. The plants thrive in a band between the tropics called the coffee belt.
Pick the ripe cherries

Pickers walk the same trees repeatedly for selective picking, which is slow, careful hand work. A strip picker clears a whole branch in one pass, by hand or by machine.

End of the lineCoffee cherries Next it goes into roasted coffee, decaf coffee, caffeine.

Worth repeating

Coffee reached Brazil in 1727, and by 1852 Brazil was the largest producer in the world.
In one repeated legend, Kaldi, a 9th-century goatherd, saw his flock energized by chewing the coffee plant.
The two main bean types are Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta.