Sustainable Coffee Farming in Nyeri

The word sustainability in the coffee sector gets thrown around a lot and i can assure you it has 1001 meanings----the answers all vary depending on whom you are talking to! On one side are my friends from Environmental conservation talking about ''shade grown or bird-friendly' coffee cultivation ( dont get me wrong, i have nothing against them! hej thats another story) well not forgetting my 'kumpels' at Fair Trade, UTZ, Rainforest Alliance just to mention but a few! ......
On the other side of the murky Chania River waters are my coffee producing communities
,my people whom from dawn to dusk still toil on the coffee fields so they can put a meal on the table, take their children to school, they basically live from one coffee season to another- Sustainability to them have to carry a whole load of Economic aspect in it.....to them sustainable coffee means hiyer yields, and bringing their families out of poverty.

One year ago when i first told my father that we was going to farm environmentally, economically traceable coffee sought by western consumers, he believed in me. His watery eyes told it all...he spoke to the other small-scale farmers and we all know now as a community that the future is brighter.

My community agreed to adopt sustainable farming to boost our production, and me and the crew would get down to work to ensure that their lives became stable. We decided to use sustainability as a holistic approach to the coffee supply chain...... our communities had suffered through the decades, and if they continued suffering that would affect the quality and supply. Enough was enough, we was to work only with Transparency to enforce trust levels for the coffee producers and the consumers in the western world.

Today the Kedovo team in Kenya who are responsible for the training and capacity building for the coffee producers towards sustainable farming, spent the day at one of the tree nursery assisting the farmers obtain new seedlings in readiness to the next phase of planting more coffee bushes inorder to continue with our pilot project of organically cultivated coffee.

the gang making sure the coffee seedlings are inorder and ready for replanting especially with the ongoing heavy rains.

We continue planting more coffee in the knowledge that our farmers will have a decent income and a future in growing coffee.

We continue our journey ( not marked by distance and its not a voyage) in the coffee world . Our journey is towards sustainable produced coffee that has in mind fair prices paid to the communities who labour so much to produce it.
The words fair prices mean a lot to us at Chania coffee and Kedovo because we are children of those coffee producers. Our journey is all about how our village will put strength in numbers policy and we will all come out strong....
We continue planting more coffee..