CLN’s organic agriculture program is going strong in 2024 with over 430,000 coffee bushes and 20,000 macadamia trees planted. We also added 300 rural families over the past year and now work with 1000+ farming families!
We’re excited to be starting our first coffee harvest in December with the coffee processing factory fully running. We have the machines in place, and this winter we’ll be establishing improved and consistent processing to ensure higher quality beans which will help maximize the selling price of our coffee. To facilitate this, we plan on bringing a Nepali expert with a coffee Ph.D. to refine our factory procedures. Training and managing for bean quality is our top priority this year because good marketable coffee is all about proper processing and quality control.
This will be the first year that we remove parchment at our factory. Parchment is the paper thin covering on green coffee beans and the final technical step in order to have green beans ready to sell. In past years, we had to transport our coffee to Kathmandu where there were machines for this final step. Now buyers from Korea, Japan, and Germany have all visited our rural coffee area and have shown great interest in purchasing our beans directly from our processing plant. (We also have U.S. buyers interested–though it’s a long way to ship, which adds cost.)
As knowledge spreads and plants mature, our technical agricultural focus will shift to improving compost. This is another key component of improving coffee taste and plant yield for both coffee and macadamias. We are bringing a soil agronomist from Kathmandu to train 40 leader farmers plus our staff technician on improved composting. These leader farmers and our local technician will then train 180 neighboring farmers who will share the information with smaller farmers in their villages.
In the most recent harvest, roughly 250 farmers with mature bushes collectively harvested 48 metric tons of coffee cherries, generated $42,000 from the sale of parchment beans, and earned an additional $13,500 by selling coffee seedlings to other farmers. The income per family ranges from $50 to $2000 depending on the size of the farm and the maturity of their bushes. Annual per capita income in CLN’s rural project areas is ~$900, so coffee income is already making a significant difference to our families and will continue to grow!
| Macadamia trees take 6-10 years to mature. CLN farmers’ nut production is still too low for commercial sale, but demand for macadamia seedlings in the region is high. Our farmers will sell their nuts this year to other farmers for seedlings to become future trees, and this creates additional small earnings for our early farmers. The goal is to grow 3000 seedlings in nurseries this year, and the more we can source local seeds (rather than buying in Kathmandu and transporting), the more cost effective the nurseries become. |
Kathmandu University will test our macadamia nuts this year and to determine the nutritional value of mac nut oil, roasted nuts, mac nut paste, and mac nut butter. This information will be needed for future product labeling. The results of the testing will also help us assess future value-added processing that CLN may help implement in the rural areas where we work.
We have been working to build both financial and technical support within the palikas (local county governments). Our demo plot has helped government officials and agricultural technicians to become convinced of the viability of these cash crops and to begin to allocate funds to support the program with water tanks, irrigation piping, tools, seedling purchase and transport. Local government and farmers combined are contributing over 25% of the annual project cost this year! Our aim is to have the local government increasingly provide financial and technical support so we can direct CLN’s efforts to the next steps of quality control and consistency. As market linkages are made and commercial volume increases, the industries will increasingly stand on their own over the next 3-4 years.
We have more and more farmers requesting to be part of the program, and we plan to add 200 new families in 2025!
