Mechanical Coffee Harvesting in Brazil
Here’s a quick follow-up post to show mechanical harvesting in a little more detail. It was one of many eye-popping moments during our Brazil trip this past week. Seeing coffee treated this way would be frowned on in most other parts of the world, but in Brazil it just makes sense. It signals innovation and adaptation in a country where development and opportunity have made hand-picked coffee not only expensive, but nearly impossible. Why pick coffee if you can make more money doing something else? These mechanized systems are a huge part of what keeps coffee profitable for Brazilian farmers. It means scaling production far outpaces the need to scale up labor. And how well do they work? We were shocked by how well they remove the cherries without breaking branches or damaging the incoming flowers. The fact that much of the coffee has already dried on the tree probably helps, but this is standard practice whether using large harvesters like the one in this video, or the hand machines used on farms that can’t accommodate one (more on “hand machines” in another post). There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’ll be thinking of ways to illustrate some of what we learned on this trip in future posts.
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