Sustainable Harvest aims to protect beans, growers, environment
Sustainable Harvest hosts an annual gathering where farmers with the Kanyovu coffee cooperative near Tanzania’s Gombe National Park meet with other growers and roasters to figure out ways to improve the quality of the coffee they grow.
Habitat loss is one of the most serious threats to the chimpanzees that famous primatologist Jane Goodall has studied for more than 40 years.
The people of the villages surrounding Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where the chimpanzees live, contribute to deforestation by cutting down trees for firewood, and to clear space for grazing livestock and growing crops.
One crop that doesn’t require a cleared space to cultivate is shade-grown coffee, which thrives under the forest canopy.
But because traditional coffee farming methods in this area tend to produce beans of an inconsistent quality, which sell for a low price, farmers are economically pressured to switch from coffee to other cash crops that do require a clear-cut area to grow.
So a few years ago, Goodall spoke at a gathering of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. She posed a question: Wasn’t there a way that the farmers could make more money from their coffee, so that they could continue to grow the chimp-friendly crop instead of cutting more forest?
In attendance was a Portland-based company called Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers. Sustainable Harvest imports nearly 10 percent of the world’s fair-trade and organic coffee, supplying raw beans to roasters, who sell the coffee under their own brand names.
Sustainable Harvest founder David Griswold is known as a pioneer in the specialty coffee industry for his “Relationship Coffee†business model, which opens channels of communication between roasters and growers and creates a more transparent supply chain.
One way in which Sustainable Harvest fosters strong ties between growers and roasters is by hosting an annual gathering called Let’s Talk Coffee, where representatives from each side of the supply chain sit down together to discuss the finer points of coffee quality – via Berlitz translators when necessary.
Few connect in old model
It may seem strange, but many small coffee growers do not ever taste the coffee that is brewed from their product. How would they know to market their coffee as having a “distinctly floral and molasses note†or a “hint of chocolate�
Roasters and growers leave Let’s Talk Coffee conferences sharing a common language of tastes and standards. That mutual understanding gives small farmers in the developing world “a fighting chance,†Griswold says.
By comparison, in the more traditional supply model, the growers rarely meet the roasters. Instead, they sell their crops to middlemen who do the purchasing for large transnational firms.
Usually, each farmer’s small crop is mixed with other harvests from the area. So even if one grower produces beans of a particularly high quality, they cannot ask for a higher price.
In contrast, Sustainable Harvest can trace every coffee back to a farmer who is generally part of either a small family farm or a cooperative – quite a feat considering that the company buys from approximately 150,000 farmers and 85 cooperatives in 16 different countries.
In Oregon, prize matters
On June 1, Sustainable Harvest won an Exemplar award in the small-business category during the first annual Oregon Sustainability Awards, which are sponsored by the state of Oregon.
Griswold was excited to receive the award: “If you’re in a sustainable category and you win something in Oregon, it really means something. Because this is where a lot of like-minded, very cutting-edge businesses are.â€
The company has just a couple of local roasters as customers. Most of the Sustainable Harvest coffee in Portland is found at national grocery store chains: Whole Foods carries Allegro Coffee and Fred Meyer carries Green Mountain Coffee.
Nonetheless, Sustainable Harvest feels like a local company. That’s partly because it has strong connections with Portland businesses, including its fellow tenants in the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, such as ShoreBank Pacific, where Sustainable Harvest banks.
Another tenant of the building, the Lemelson Foundation, has provided a grant to support Sustainable Harvest’s efforts to help coffee farmers near the Gombe National Park.
Farms needed work
After Goodall’s speech at that SCAA meeting, coffee industry players started thinking about how to help the Tanzanian farmers improve the quality of their coffee.
“We took that idea and figured out how we could make that coffee good enough so it could be specialty, so that we could then buy it for our roasters,†says Libby Evans, manager of Sustainable Harvest’s Farmer Development Programs.
The Tanzanian farmers were selling coffee through the Kanyovu growers’ cooperative, which is made up of farmers from eight villages near Gombe National Park. The growers of the cooperative farmed using simple, traditional methods.
They didn’t know the best way to pick coffee, and because they had no warehouses, they stored the harvested coffee in or near their homes, where it might sit next to trash piles or gasoline containers.
Sustainable Harvest had to help build up the Kanyovu cooperative before they could work on developing their usual importer-grower business relationship.
It was a massive project that would take more resources than Sustainable Harvest could invest – even though 50 percent of the company’s gross operating margin is funneled back into supply-side activities and farmer training – so the Lemelson Foundation offered its support.
Sustainable Harvest moved operations from its Rwandan office to Tanzania. (The company also has offices in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Lima, Peru.) It hired three Tanzanian agronomists and trained them to be experts in producing, picking and processing specialty coffee. Those agronomists now provide training support for the 2,700-member cooperative.
Concurrently, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters began purchasing some of the Kanyovu cooperative’s specialty coffee crop, which Green Mountain recently released as a coffee called Gombe Reserve.
The coffee, which is part of Green Mountain’s line of rare (and expensive) “Special Reserve†coffees, was deemed “outstanding†by a well-respected coffee buying guide called Coffee Review.
Sustainable Harvest employees say they are proud to be making a difference.
“I love my job because I go to work in the morning and know that my job is the same as my values,†Evans says.
Fernando Seminario, Sustainable Harvest’s director of importing, compares being a coffee importer to being the drummer in a band.
Seminario says: “You’re not the lead singer or the main guy up in front, but you’re definitely keeping the beat. You’re really important for the whole sound to be good. I like that.â€
 [tags]Gombe National Reserve Coffee, Jane Goodall, Special Reserve Coffee, sustainable harvest, shade grown coffee, green mountain coffee[/tags]
