Coffee farmers tap US expert for mechanisation

BANGALORE: Faced with a critical labour shortage on coffee plantations, which is sometimes as high as 75% during the peak harvesting season, the 114-year-old United Planters��� Association of Southern India (Upasi) has flown in US engineering expert on tropical and subtropical agriculture Dan Kuhn to help devise a mechanisation system suitable for India���s shade-coffee, grown in the highlands.

Kuhn, who has worked on such projects in coffee-growing countries with terrain similar to India, told ET here today that mechanisation could cut labour costs to the tune of 50% in all the stages of cultivation leading up to harvesting.

Upasi coffee committee chairman Shaji Philip estimated that over 5 lakh workers were needed on India���s coffee plantations, some two lakhs at the time of the harvesting season which began in November-December and ended in February-March.

In recent harvesting seasons, there had, he said, been a labour shortage as high as 75% because plantation workers were migrating to other sectors like mining, construction, textiles and infrastructure development. ���We have had to increase the daily rate to Rs 125 from the minimum wage of Rs 86, which erodes our profitability.���

Enter Dan Kuhn, who has spent the last 45 years working on coffee-related projects all over the world, after studying tropical and sub-tropical agriculture first at the University of Hawaii and then in Germany, apart from the US Soil Salinity Laboratory in California.

���There is,��� says Kuhn, ���no single-size-fits-all for mechanisation which is not cost-effective in very steep terrain. In intermediate terrain, there is scope, if adjustments are made to the plantation. After returning to Bangalore from a field trip to Karnataka, I feel an all-terrain vehicle or a walk-behind tractor could make it easier to cut labour costs to the tune of 50% in the stages of cultivation leading up to harvesting, like the application of fertiliser, spraying of fungicides, herbicidies and insecticides, pruning, shade-thinning, mowing, weeding, planting and replanting.

Again, a green-bean separator could be ideal for Indian conditions, given the premium for red berries. If technology is used to ensure that there is uniform ripening of berries, sophisticated systems like a pull-behind harvester could be deployed, incorporating features to automatically check out the required FRF (fruit-removal force) and a refractometer to detect the optimum sugar-level.

However, technology is just part of the solution. If Hawaii���s Kona Extra Fancy Coffee retails at $12 a pound, it is because of the successful marketing of the brand. I have cupped Indian coffees which are excellent but sell at around one-tenth the price of Kona!���