§01 · The brief, in one sentence
The first thing we did on the farm was nothing, for ninety days. We watched the rain pattern, soil-tested twice, mapped the slope, and wrote down the order of operations before we cut a single sapling. This is the playbook for an organic coffee farm on inherited ground: the choices we made, the ones we didn't, and the eleven people who do the work.
§02 · Ninety days of nothing
When you stand on ten acres you've just inherited, the temptation is to clear and plant in the next month. We didn't. We spent a quarter doing the work that looks like nothing: weather logging, two soil panels, a hand-drawn topographic map of the parcel at one-meter contours, an inventory of the existing trees worth keeping, and three weekends of conversation with the previous picker crew about which corners held water in which months.
Most of what we got right in years two and three came from those ninety days. Two decisions in particular (keeping the upper-boundary stand of native trees as a windbreak, and shifting the planned mill site twenty meters east to avoid a waterlogged corner) would have cost us tens of thousands of shillings to fix later if we'd learned them the wrong way.
§03 · Clearing without burning
We hand-cleared the ten acres over six weeks with a crew of twelve. Every cleared biomass (branches, brush, smaller stumps) went into one of three windrows along the lower fence line, where it cured for ninety days and then fed the first compost cycle. Nothing was burned. Nothing was hauled off the property. The carbon we displaced when we cleared went back into the soil over the next two seasons.
Three principles we set in writing before the first machete swing:
The fastest way to clear ten acres in this part of Kenya is fire. We didn't. Burning vents the carbon you spent decades accumulating, sterilizes the topsoil microbiome, and angers the neighbors downwind. We hand-cleared with machetes and chainsaws over six weeks. The biomass got chipped into the future compost piles. Slower, dirtier, the only call.
Coffee is a contour crop on a slope. Straight rows down a hill move water faster than it should move and erode the topsoil into the watercourse. We laid the rows on contour, marked with an A-frame level. It cost an extra ten days. The soil that stays on the slope after each long rain is the entire margin.
The picker labor pool around Muhoroni is real but it is not infinite, and the picker who works your trees in year one is the one who knows your trees in year five. We signed eight pickers on retainer through year zero (paid a stipend even when there was nothing to pick) so the crew was the same crew when the first cherry came on. Cheap insurance against a chaotic first harvest.
§04 · The shade plan: Mukau and banana
Coffee evolved as an understory plant. It wants thirty to fifty percent canopy cover. On commodity farms, that canopy gets stripped to push yields, which is the trade that gives you faster cherry and a thinner cup. We sit at thirty-eight percent cover, holding.
The canopy is two species, both regional. Native Mukau (Melia volkensii) for the upper story. It's deep-rooted, drought-tolerant, casts a clean dappled shade, and produces hardwood the farm uses for fenceposts and the mill structure. Banana for the understory: it gives a second income stream for the picker crew, the biomass goes back into compost when we cut it, and the wide leaves moderate the microclimate around the coffee in the dry shoulder.
The canopy is the farm. The coffee is what grows in the canopy's shade.From the field notes, week 06
§05 · Cover crops and the no-till call
Between the coffee rows we run a two-year rotation of pigeon pea and lablab. Both are nitrogen-fixers. Pigeon pea is the deeper-rooted of the two and brings up minerals the coffee can't reach. Lablab is the heavier biomass producer; we cut it green at the second flowering and lay it back as mulch on the contour.
We do not till. The full case for no-till is longer than this post, but the short version is that the fungal networks under a no-till field are an order of magnitude denser than under a tilled one, and those networks are what move minerals from depth into the coffee's root zone. The compounding cost is patience: it took us eighteen months for the soil structure to start looking right. The compounding benefit is that we have not bought a synthetic input since.
§06 · The crew
Eleven people on the ground at full build: eight pickers, one mill operator, one agronomist on retainer two days a week, and an operations lead who runs the post- harvest logistics. Plus me on the import side. Pickers are paid by the kilogram of ripe-only cherry; overripe, underripe, and split cherries are sorted at the table, not at the tree. The premium for selective picking lands in the cup.
The contributor strip on this journal will fill out as the team starts writing. Today it's one byline. By the next harvest there should be three, then five. The journal is the team's journal. That's the structure.