Currently, a new market opens up for agricultural producers and that of Agro-tourism. Traveling to a quiet farm, enjoying the clean air, its excellent landscapes and even harvesting the main product, has become a trend among lovers of ecological tourism. Below I show you a summary of what my visit was in the coffee harvest season at Coffee Farm 4D. The Farm is located in the El Cielo hunt, in the Cordillera of Turimiquire north of Anzoátegui state in Venezuela, you can contact them through instagram. It is a farm where the main crop is coffee, has 10 productive hectares divided into several microlotes of different varieties of coffee such as Typica, Buorbon, Catuai, Catimor and Inea 01. It also has citrus plantations, bananas (musaceas), among others.

Day 1:

We left from Barcelona to the little village of Bergantín, then we started to climb approximately 1 hour on a somewhat rustic road, but nothing of the other world for those who love adventure and outdoor experiences! 

A short time later we felt the mountain climate, we were entering the farm, which once we settled into the main house we could take our first cup of coffee and start exploring the place.

 We were able to know in theory the whole process and the machinery used for the harvest and benefit of coffee, something that is different from other crops but that closely resembles the process of cocoa, another indigenous culture and little cultivated in that area.

Throughout the coffee zone, animal traction is widely used to transport cargo, in this case the mule, which is a hybrid animal of a mare (female horse) and a donkey or donkey. The result of the mixture is these animals that we see in the photo, have a resemblance to a robust horse but with big ears like the ass. As in the whole mountain area dominates the inclined relief and it rains almost every day it is somewhat difficult to transport manually or in trucks of sacks with harvest, this is why this animal is used that has extreme strength, even to move between 150 and 180 Kg of harvest per trip in mountain trails. 

Donkeys or donkeys are also used but according to locals they are only used for small distances and in flat reliefs, because they are weaker than mules.

Day 2:

Getting up earlier than usual and very cold, we went to the hacienda to know the practical part of the harvest, there are very important aspects that everyone who wants to harvest the coffee cherries should know.

1. It should be harvested only ripe fruits, no pintones or sobremaduros.
2. Do not scrape the branch, as it is difficult to make the selection in the plant and you lose many leaves that are going to be needed for the next harvest.
3. At the time of harvest, the bag should be kept closed so as not to propagate the bit that is an animal similar to the weevil but that destroys the coffee cherry and translates into losses for the producer.
4. Try as much as possible not to drop cherries on the ground, also to combat the reproduction of the bit.
5. All the harvested coffee must be taken the same day to the profit machines, all this to guarantee a quality export coffee.
6. Each bag should be marked with the harvest data, variety of coffee, microlote, among others in addition to keeping a record per kilos / day.

Already in the plantation and knowing the rules we started to harvest, a somewhat tedious task that is worth experiencing at some point in our lives. We started with coffee plants Buorbon yellow variety approximately 3 years old.

With the basket put as they say the locals hehe!

 and a machete in the basket just in case!

Something difficult is to select a cherry color in the same plant because always without wanting and with the fingers lack of experience in the harvest of coffee, always some cherries are picked green or pintonas but then removed from the bags before doing the pulping .

Once the sack is full we prepare all the harvest of the day, we mount it in the animals of load and we proceed to take them to the center of benefit where a group of people wait for the selection of the cherries again, to guarantee the quality since as we experts commented a green cherry will produce an astringent taste in the coffee rate at the time of tasting the drink, the astringency is something similar to the flavor of the mamón, which is a well-known Venezuelan fruit. It also produces bitterness in the cup that is considered a defect, because the drink must have a balance between acid and sweet but never have bitterness. They also say that a coffee that comes from ripe or red cherries has so much sugar that it is irrelevant to sweeten it when taking it.

Day 3:

After the selection in the plant of benefit proceeds to take it to the machine pulping, which is nothing more than mechanically remove the shell to the cherry and leave only the seed with the pulp to then apply the washing and drying of these . If it is washed or not depends on what you want to get, washing the seed will give a cleaner coffee called washed coffee, but it can be dried without washing to obtain a coffee called Honey or you can also dry the ripe cherries without pulping to obtain a Coffee called Natural, which is very wanted by the Baristas to make filtered coffees.

As a quality policy of the farm, only the seeds are dried in African beds to achieve a superior quality in the taste of coffee, this in order to certify the production as specialty coffee and also to achieve better profits at the time of sale of the product, traditionally the drying was done in cement patios but the quality and the organoleptic properties of the product deteriorated and therefore the price obtained by the producers was lower making agricultural activity unprofitable and attractive.

In addition to coffee seeds, other by-products are also extracted, such as the coffee husk that is exported to prepare infusions and which contain high caffeine content. Its flavor is similar to the smell of ripe tamaríndo, which is a tropical fruit also known to all in Venezuela.

I hope you enjoyed part of the visit, it's all for today, in the next post I will bring you photos of the last days at the Coffee Farm 4D, blessed day and remember to give upvote!