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Muddy Boots
How to strive in the coffee farming business?
Meeting Tanzania’s Southern Highlands smallholder coffee farmers Located in the East African Rift in Southern Tanzania, Mbeya city and its sprawling suburbs cover a hilly valley between gigantic mountain ranges. The city serves as a regional hub due to its...
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Coffee and Deforestation
About one third of the world's land, more than four billion hectares, is forests. Every year, this area decreases by an average of 13 million hectares which corresponds to around 35 football fields per minute. The largest losses are observed in Africa and South...
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There’s No Shortcut To Sustainable Coffee
I find myself presenting the Neumann Foundation’s long-term sustainability approach to the coffee industry on a regular basis. I want to get companies more involved and develop a better understanding of what is needed in the field. In my conversations, I...
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Groundwater recharge – helping Vietnamese farmers to build climate resilience
A year ago now, in March 2017 first Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) stations were installed at six locations in Dak Lak to test the technology and decide on its future implementstion in the Central Highlands to help coffee farmers deal with water scarcity during the...
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Becoming a coffee entrepreneur: Osman tells his story
“I always had the dream to immigrate to the US and become a doctor. My parents are coffee farmers in the Municipality of Fraternidad, Honduras; but I never truly envisioned myself as a farmer due to the challenges I saw my parents face to ensure there was food on the...
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Coffee Kids Releases 2017 Annual Report
Our North American organization Coffee Kids has released their annual report for 2017.
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Trieu Thi Chau. Mega-Tons of Water We Used For Irrigation Before Were Totally Wasteful
In 2010 I took over my parents’ coffee farm that they had started in 1994. It’s our family tradition. Back in the day my grandparents worked on French coffee plantations. That’s where they learnt about coffee growing and passed their knowledge to next generations. We...
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Things I’ll Never Do Again – My Failures In Coffee Sustainability
It is a bit cliche to say that we learn the most from our failures. But, of course, like most cliches, we repeat it because it is true. And if we learn the most from our failures, and it is critical to learn from each other, then by all rights we need to...
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Sewing Rural Youths Future: Nalubowa Ruth
“I dropped out of school because I couldn’t pay the tuition fees at the age of 18”, remembers Ruth “I then started picking coffee as farmworker to earn some money.” Ruth is now 25 years old and lives in Mityana, Uganda. Her aim has been to take a tailoring...
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What’s Worse? Overhead, or Coffee Projects That Don’t Work?
I regularly find myself in discussions with partners on “overhead” when planning sustainability coffee projects. It’s an important conversation, but it often starts with a fundamental mistake—we assume projects with low overhead are “efficient.” But, in...
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Indonesian officials exchanging about Vietnamese coffee miracle
The official visit of the OKU Selatan District’s governor Mr. Popo Ali and his associates to Dak Lak province has been organized and hosted by Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung in November 2017 as a part of South-South exchange initiative. The visit of the Indonesian...
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How We Make Gender Work in the Ivory Coast
A coffee plant in a Hamburg office building: Our team member Hermann Kouassi from Ivory Coast is well surprised; “It is very good to see it growing even here. But we have better cherries”, he smiles.
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Hands-on in Vietnam
Hands-On in Tanzania Figures Improving The Lives of Young Coffee Farmers For Bui Ngoc Vinh it is all about water. And that doesn’t make his work as irrigation engineer for HRNS in Vietnam always easy: “As you know, water resources are becoming increasingly scarce, so...
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The Seven Cardinal Sins of Coffee Sustainability
I am an eternal optimist. You have to be in this line of work—protecting the future of coffee is tireless work, and it can feel like once we’ve solved one challenge, in one place, then a dozen more bubble up. Taking time to count the successes and keeping...
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Ending Invisibility of Women On Colombian Coffee Farms
Without women there would be no coffee. All too often we forget their role in coffee production. They are present in almost 100% of the farms and active in the different production processes. But their participation in decision-making, in participation in...
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Asia-Pacific cooperation: Indonesian coffee agronomists get trained in Vietnam
Why does a farmer in Indonesia harvest 0.5 Mt of coffee per ha, whereas in Vietnam they get 2-4 Mt? It’s not just geography and climate. Both countries face unpredictable weather fluctuations. Rather, it’s agricultural methods. As the governor of OKU...
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Dave D’haeze on global coffee supply shortage: think Philippines
It was probably the last thing that delegates of the 23d International Coffee Conference expected to hear when the regional manager of Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung Asia Pacific Dr. Dave D’haeze pointed out: “Philippines has a potential of becoming the third...
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Is Our Strategy as Green as Our Beans?
If you haven’t read Anya Khalamayzer’s piece in GreenBiz on Starbucks’ sustainability bonds yet, I encourage you to. It presents a very nice summary of the state of coffee sustainability today--what our sector is trying to do, why it’s urgent, how it relates to...
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Managed Aquifer Recharge to Refill Groundwater Reservoirs
Watering coffee plants during the blooming stage is vital in the Central Highlands. Without proper irrigation flowers remain small and prone to wilthing. They wouldn’t develop into good cherries. Which would mean poorer yields and lower income. No wonder...
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