This is the first in a series of features where we highlight the great work of some pioneering coffee farmers in South Africa!
This week we chat to Carel Burger of Foothills Coffee Farm in White River Mpumalanga.
You can buy the very exclusive and extremely limited edition Discover Great Coffee Club Box this month, featuring our 6 SA Grown coffees, including this one, from Foothills!
Thank you for growing this coffee and for being part of our Discover Great Coffee Club! Tell us a little bit about this coffee in particular (varietal, how many trees, yields, where it’s situated on the farm, is there shade…describe it for our readers!)
We are a small coffee farm just outside White River, Mpumalanga. We have a mixture of F6 and SL34 trees (Arabica). We usually produce around 1.5 tons of green beans a year but we are expanding each year and planting more trees. We currently have around 13 000 trees in the ground. What makes as unique is that we incorporate multi cropping, so what that means is that we plant the coffee trees in between our mac trees which gives the coffee trees the needed shade to produce high quality coffee. Other advantages of farming these two together is that they share fertilizer as well as pesticide sprays which help keep the costs down.
Tell us a little bit about your farm, where it is, how long you’ve been there, a bit of history around the farm, your family and the farming community around you (ie what do most other farmers do in your district?
We as a family have been farming in White River for the last 20 years with Macadamias. The White River / Nelspruit area is covered in macadamia farms. We started the coffee in 2015 and were on of the first to implement multi cropping of macs and coffee.
How did you get into coffee farming and what made you plant and propagate these trees?
So we started the coffee farming nearly by accident. We had a single coffee F6 coffee tree in the garden for many years and one holiday, while looking for something to do we harvested the coffee cherries from the trees. After a bit of googling we learnt how to dry and plant the seeds, not really expecting much. To our surprise they sprouted quickly and started to grow really well. Well now we had nearly 800 trees and what to do with them? So we figured lets plant them next to the mac trees since there is already water. We planted them and basically forgot about them from there. Two years go by and to our astonishment 800 trees were flowering like crazy. We frantically started to research coffee farming try to learn as much as possible. We learnt about the advantages of shade grown coffee and how we accidently started on the right foot. We harvested the beans ourselves and went through the entire process by hand, we roasted the beans over a pan and low and behold we had really tasty coffee. We then started to consider coffee as an additional income source for the farm. We took it very slow in the beginning and learnt from pros like Robbie Nel which was farming coffee in Hazyview. Taking our time gave us the ability to figure out all the processes and test the market for a locally grown coffee. We had an encouraging start but marketing the coffee was a long and painful road but we like to think we made it in the end.
What is your vision for farming coffee - is there a long term goal?
We would like to really solidify FootHills Coffee a position in the South African coffee market as well as support farms around us so that South Africa can be recognized internationally as a coffee growing country. Our goal is to produce some of the highest quality coffee in SA and use ONLY our own coffee in our products. It means growth is slow but good things take time.
What are you most interested in from our readers and people who taste this coffee? What are the feedback areas you’d like to know about?
We would like your readers to know that SA has real coffee farms that produce excellent quality beans that is 100% locally produced. We would like to encourage people in supporting local products not just coffee.
All images are supplied by the farmers!
