Wide awake in Amadeo

On the road to Amadeo, Cavite for the annual coffee farm tour courtesy of Figaro Coffee, no Mozart is on the sound system to accompany us on the one-and-a half-hour ride to the outskirts of Mega Manila. Why Mozart? It’s just that we are reminded of the guy’s music, finding out that we are on our way to coffee town, Amadeo or Amadeus, with or without a seatbelt, but powered nonetheless by the early coffee on a wobbly Saturday morning complete with hangover and such, sipped at take-off point along C. Palanca Street in Makati. Not classical music, but what could well be imagined as sifting through the mic, is none other than the voice of Figaro director Chit Juan, briefing the kind listeners with an everyman’s history of coffee.

The voice, Chit Juan’s voice though, is real, and it is not singing Don Giovanni, but rather telling her audience that yes, in the time of our ancestors the Philippines was the number four top producer of coffee worldwide, which distinction has considerably eroded through the years, to the point that we are no longer self-sufficient in the crop, we have to import about half the stuff, but never the mind, we’re making inroads to address that, and soon enough, she assures, through the help of organic farming and the indefatigable National Coffee Development Board’s 10-year plan, we’ll be able to be a major player again in the trade of the blessed bean. Among other tidbits she mentions is that the world’s largest consumers of coffee are, in descending order, the United States, Germany and Japan, three first world and highly industrialized countries that, whether or not coincidentally, were major players in the Pacific War.

Must have been something in the beverage that made these countries get back to the order of business, and in fact helped them become among the world’s most robust economies. Per capita, the heaviest coffee drinkers are the northern Europeans, where the cold Nordic weather perhaps gives them little choice but to warm themselves, budget-style. As for coffee producers, there’s the world champion Brazilians, who also happen to excel in football, also known as soccer, but a coffee bean by any other name remains a coffee bean, and the country that gave the world Pele, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldhino and Rider sandals also produces the most coffee.

Number 2, as we are to learn later in the day from Amadeo town councilor and coffee board member Rene Tongson, is upstart Vietnam, whose people, with a burst of energy after the war, planted nearly every available space of arable land with the crop. Somewhere at midpoint on the road to Amadeo there is still no Mozart, rather organic consultant Patrick Belisario switching places with Chit in our two-coaster party, this time to further enlighten us on the differences between organic and traditional farming, and the clear benefits of the former in terms of sustainable health-conscious agriculture in the long run. Even then Patrick is quick to point out that chemicals are not always needed to get rid of pests or blight, as recall the heyday of Philippine coffee farming was when farmers relied mainly on the natural guides and signs, and the act and ritual of preparing the soil for the crop all the way to planting and the patient wait for the harvest, was calendared on the good old fashioned farmer’s almanac.

"When there are pests in the crop, you study the extent of the damage and devise natural ways to get rid of this," Patrick says, and not by bombarding it with insecticide. The use of compost and other wastes is also better than industrial strength fertilizer to ensure a bumper–not monster–crop, he says.

Upon arrival in Amadeo at midmorning, what greets us is neither coffee nor its comforting scent, rather Mayor Albert Ambagan to give us an update on the coffee farms in the town, quite a number indeed adopted by out-of-towners from Manila. Mostly the crop planted is the robusta variety, since it is more suited to this type of elevation than the other popular bean, arabica. Right outside the capitolyo stands a huge coffee pot as well as a mug, enduring symbols of a town that is, after all, preparing for a Valentine’s weekend coffee festival, the Pahimis, at the time of writing.

The first tour stop is at a traditional farm in Barangay Loma, where Dr. Alejandro Mojica of Cavite State University informally discusses traditional coffee farming methods, how Cavite farmers want to adopt the methods used in Mindanao (Sultan Kudarat province is top producer of coffee with Cavite only second, although in terms of municipalities Amadeo is tops, according to Councilor Tongson), while Mindanao farmers in turn want to use Cavite methods.

In the farm we visit there is what is called inter-cropping, or the planting of other crops while waiting for the coffee trees to reach the age of productivity–about three years. So there’s also peanuts in this farm, and a barrel of boiled legumes is soon enough presented cowboy-style to the tour participants, the nilagang mani having been grown organically of course.

Asked if the organically grown peanuts tasted any different from the ordinary ones, Dr. Mojica says perhaps the greatest difference is psychological, before deferring to Belisario, who says the bottomline is that the organically grown crop is healthier, and so reaps benefits not only for the environment but also for the psyche. Mojica also admits that organic farms are labor-intensive, as it takes five people to take charge of a hectare as compared to the usual two persons per hectare. This results in organically grown products fetching a steeper price, as farmers would have to be rewarded for steering clear of the genetically modified stuff.

On the whole we could say that organic peanuts do taste subtly sweeter, or it might also be our taste buds doing subtle mind tricks. There is a coffee farm we visit where we get to see up close the bean ripening on the branch, and learn posthaste that a coffee tree’s average years of productivity would be 60. But after every seven or nine years, a tree has to be pruned almost to the stump, to ensure another cycle of growth and subsequent bountiful harvest. And when trees reach the age of 40 in any farm, then the land has to be gradually replanted so that the crop would not run out.

Afterwards it is on to a post-harvest facility with Amadeo Tourism Office’s Richard Luman-das, where, as the itinerary says, we can "witness the delicate process behind your everyday cup of coffee".

In a somewhat elevated portion of land where the air is distinctly cooler, the newly harvested berries are laid out to dry under the sun, a similar sight of which we see on the roadside about town and on concrete driveways; the residents are really true-blue coffee producers.

After two weeks the now somewhat black-ened berries are separated and laid to dry some more in another portion of the facility, and henceforth to a kind of winnowing machine where the bean is further reduced to nearly granule form ready for transport to market.

We might have missed a step or two in this process, as there were at least three different sites where the coffee was laid out, with varying degrees of dryness. Then what follows is easily the best part of the tour–an al fresco lunch of fried tilapia, meatballs, kare-kare on a hillside of a pilot barako farm, for we are informed that the coffee board’s concen-tration would be the planting of barako trees organically, hopefully to yield enough produce to carve out a niche in the world market by year 2012. For even by then we would not be self-sufficient in coffee, if the program holds up we would still be importing five to ten percent of our coffee consumption, give or take a few percentage points for margin of error.

Yet a brief stop at the roadside Café Amadeo certainly does not dampen anyone’s spirits, as more styrofoam cups of the wondrous beverage are handed out post-prandially. And a final drop by the Ilog ni Maria honey bee farm no longer has us watching out for Mozart, Amadeo or Amadeus, because here we get a taste of honey fresh from the honey comb, and eventually raise our index fingers up as if to say, "eureka!" shortly before we board our coasters armed with organic coffee, honey products, a t-shirt from Figaro, among other knick-knacks on the long road back to Manila–or is it Makati–and the very boring world of late afternoon.