A bag of coffee does not show you how many times someone walked a steep row of trees to care for it.
At our family farm in El Salvador, fertilization is one of those jobs. It takes planning, materials and people willing to carry them across terrain where we cannot simply send a machine down every row. In this episode of our coffee journey, I want to show you what that looked like during the 2023 growing season.
How do we fertilize coffee trees? That season, we used both bokashi, an organic soil amendment we prepare at the farm, and a formulated fertilizer applied in separate rounds. The aim was to support the trees as they grew and developed the next crop. What a farm needs to apply, and how much, depends on its own soil, trees and conditions; this is an account of our 2023 plan, not a recipe for every coffee farm.
What is bokashi?
Bokashi is a fermented organic soil amendment. Ours uses materials available to us at the farm, including coffee pulp. It is a way to put some of the material left from coffee production back to work.
We applied bokashi in April and May 2023. If you read Episode III of this series, you may remember the team preparing it and applying it around young trees.
I like being able to show that part of the work. It is one thing to talk about caring for the soil; it is another to make the material, move it across the farm and put it where the team has planned to use it. Bokashi is one part of our soil and plant-care approach. I would not claim it alone determines yield or the flavour of a finished cup.
Why did we also use a formulated fertilizer?
Coffee trees need nutrients to grow and produce cherries. Organic amendments and formulated fertilizers do different jobs, so we used both as part of our plan that year.
The fertilizer we selected supplied major plant nutrientsānitrogen, phosphorus and potassiumāalong with smaller amounts of other nutrients. We chose a product designed to release nutrients over time. That mattered to us as we planned applications through the growing season and considered the farmās rainfall.
It cost more than some alternatives. Choosing it did not mean that every nutrient would stay exactly where we put it or that heavy rain could never cause losses. Farming does not offer that sort of guarantee. We still had to think about timing, placement and what the trees needed.
For the 2023 season, our plan was three applications of approximately four ounces per tree each time. That figure describes what I reported for our farm that year. It should not be used as a fertilizer recommendation without knowing the product formulation and the condition of a particular farm.
What does fertilization look like on a steep coffee farm?
From a distance, āapply fertilizerā sounds like one task. On our farm, it took around 14 days to complete a round.
The team moved fertilizer from the warehouse out to the fields and distributed it by hand around the trees. Our terrain makes that work demanding. During the application, we brought in additional help and our workforce grew to about 50 people, according to my notes from that season.
Those people are part of the coffee journey too. Before there is a tasting note on a bag, there are days spent moving carefully through rows of trees and doing a job that needs to be repeated, tree after tree.
What else was happening at the farm?
We were also replanting an area of the farm. At the time, a team was putting in around 100 new coffee trees a day.
A newly planted tree will not give us coffee to roast right away. Replanting is an investment in the seasons ahead, happening alongside the care of trees already producing. You can see more of the decisions leading up to that work in our account of pruning and planning after the 2023 harvest
Does fertilizer change how coffee tastes?
Plant nutrition can affect a treeās growth and its ability to produce a crop. But it would be too simple to promise that a particular fertilizer creates a particular tasting note. Variety, weather, ripeness, processing and roasting all shape the coffee we eventually taste.
For me, the connection is more practical. Caring for the trees gives us the chance to produce good cherries; then every later step has to be done well too. Our El Salvador Bourbon is one way to taste coffee grown by our family and roasted by us in Calgary. Check the product page for its current availability.
Back in August 2023, we still had another fertilization round planned for later in the season. I was looking ahead to that work, to the young trees being planted, and eventually to the harvest. That is the rhythm of a farm: while we care for this yearās crop, we are already making decisions that will matter years from now.
Until next time,
Alejandro
Ā