Rich

It is now peak harvest season for Cafe Solar, which means that everyone in Honduras is working flat out. The 250 or so farm families high in the Yoro mountains…

It’s harvest time for Cafe Solar. All over those 250 or so coffee farms in the Yoro mountains, family members are busy dawn to dusk. They are picking coffee cherries,…

Every day, in harvest season, the co-op receives more “wet beans” — coffee beans now freed from the pulp and skin that enclosed them in the coffee cherry, but still…

Each day, more beans arrive at the co-op for processing. Just 24 hours prior to arriving they were still inside ripe coffee cherries hanging on the tree, and by now…

The bean intake process begins long before the harvest,” explains Rich Trubey, program developer and co-founder of the Massachusetts-based Mesoamerican Development Institute. MDI works with Co-operativa COMISUYL on cultivation techniques…

You could say that coffee farmers have always used “solar power” to dry their beans — and you’d be right. After picking and depulping the cherries, farmers would traditionally spread…

Most of the steps in the Cafe Solar coffee harvest & processing take place in rapid succession; ripe coffee cherries are picked daily, de-pulped the same day, taken to Cooperativa…