On our website we state that we “partner with serious farmers” and that anyone who is just a coffee farmer because there are few other possibilities should do all to get out of it as soon as they can. My trip to India two weeks ago proved this point more than I could have known.
One evening in the kitchen, we were having a heated talk about impact. Akshay was convincing me that they were NOT making any impact. The community farmers they buy from could just as well sell their coffee to local traders for roughly the same price (now that the market is up) and they themselves are just dreamers who want to put Indian coffee on the map and make the most of their farm as an R&D project, knowing it will never be truly financially viable…
The delegation that Komal and Akshay invited alone was “serious”. Dr. Aaron Davis, probably the world’s leading coffee biologist, Luke Adams, Standart Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Charles Denison, coffee consultant, importer, roaster and racemosa grower (rare coffee species in South Africa), Mathew Orchard, co-founder of PLOT coffee roasters in the UK and Matteo Pavoni of Peacock Coffee Roasters and runner up Italian Barista Champion last year with Komal and Akshay’s Excelsa.
Komal and Akshay are not average coffee farmers. They made their careers in London with a fashion brand and a tech company respectively, but moved back to Coorg three years ago. Akshay’s family have been coffee “planters” (estate holders) for five generations and Akshay inherited 75 acres of Mooleh Manay (“the corner house” in the Coorg language). Since then, they have been researching, testing and upgrading the farm at a speed I have never seen before, much more akin to the startup mindset than that of an average coffee estate whose values and methods slowly evolve from generation to generation.
Their achievements in these few years are impressive. They are active on social media, set up an import business to the UK, sell coffee to local specialty coffee shops and work closely with the surrounding estates and tribal communities, whom we have proudly put on the map in Europe together.
In terms of role division, Komal is the power house behind the farm’s operations, finances, staff management, communication and marketing, while Akshay designs and upgrades the farm’s processing methods, farm layout (including the fertilisation, shade management, breeding, pruning and weeding methods) and uses almost every remaining waking hour of his days to research his newest passion: crossing rare coffee species (excelsa, stenophyla, liberica, eugenoides, racemosa, travencorensis) with arabica and robusta for increased climate resilience and productivity. Listening to Akshay talk about coffee genetics with Dr. Davis, it seemed like they were colleagues working together for a decade…
At Srirangalli with Ganesh (centre), the community leader.
So why do it if they’re not making any impact? Akshay’s response: to create a model farm that requires minimal labor and maximum outturn of high quality coffee while keeping the biodiverse agroforestry system in place. There’s an unpopular goal… minimal labour… Aren’t we in coffee development to give a chance for rural livelihoods to flourish, to give meaningful employment to as many people as possible?
The more I learn from our partners around the world it seems that this might be a pipe dream. Coffee growers who have no other opportunities such as the ones we work with in Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Myanmar and Indonesia should be supported with higher prices and stable cooperatives or export partners, sure. But what happens when these communities become better off? It is unlikely that we will stop the mega trend of farmers leaving their low-income rural lives and encouraging their kids to move to cities - and we shouldn’t, in many cases. So who will be left to produce our coffee in 30 years, and how? Our network is full a rare breed of crazy, we would say developmental entrepreneur, usually with some sort of hereditary link to coffee, that moves back from the city to farm or start export businesses - out of passion. For years they make losses, just like any startup. But in the meantime they start creating ripple effects around them by connecting farmers to better farming ways and specialty processing - but most importantly, to the world.
Lowering labour requirements for coffee can be done two ways. The first we all know, by intensifying. The Brazilian route. The second one is less known but way more sustainable, by going “high tech regenerative”, where fewer hands are necessary because of smarter farm management. What is interesting about Akshay and Komal’s approach is that it is not based on a romantic view of conservationism. Yes, they want to keep their beautiful biosphere in tact, but they figured out that costs are simply lowest when working with, not against nature. There is nothing more efficient than a forest in turning light and water into nutrients and nothing more robust, but we are only beginning to understand exactly how these complex systems actually work - to mimic them and create the low cost conditions in which nature regenerates itself requires knowledge, patience and investment - before it starts paying off. But, combined with a cutting-edge view on increasing yield, i.e. smart cross-species grafting and the planting of the most fitting hybrids, it seems Mooleh Manay might be on to a climate-proof model that could stand the worst shocks Indian coffee will have to endure in the next years: climate change and labour shortage.
That conversation in the kitchen kept going for a while, and slowly it became clear that the view on impact that Akshay calls realism and what Komal downplays are both accents of that same trait that all truly integer people share: humility and not wanting to make anything sound better than it is. But the fact is they are doing groundbreaking stuff, and are gathering the world’s brightest minds to help them realise their dreams. Best of all, everything they do is made to be shared: with surrounding estates and farmers, and broader, with any farmer and professional around the world who wants to hear it.
So how do we make impact? By getting Komal and Akshay and their friends’ coffees to enough places so these crazy entrepreneurs can keep creating ripple effects around them. We couldn’t be prouder to support these serious farmers, and to do our part in carving out a serious future for Indian coffee…
Roasters, will you join us?