Will the warm, sunny winter weather ever end?
25 January 2010
Years and years ago, I remember a commercial on TV that showed a grumpy
old farmer that was walking through town, being grumpy to everyone that
said hello. Then it started pouring rain and the farmer was out in the
middle of the street dancing. I don't remember what the commercial was
advertising but I feel like that farmer right now; the grumpy part,
not the dancing part.
Winter is our dry season and I've been told that the past three months
are the driest on record. Those records go back to the 1930's so that
shows how dry it's been. The coffee trees are showing the stress,
they're very yellow with a lot of leaf loss. Many other types of trees
are smart enough to drop their crop when the tree gets stressed but coffee
is not. Too dry and we get a lot of "overbearing dieback" which means
the trees have too heavy of a crop for the stressful conditions. This
causes the coffee tree itself to wither and even die. If we don't get
rain soon, it could be bad. Unfortunately the rains don't normally
return until April so things may get worse before they get better.
Kona coffee trees like a couple gallons of water per day. That's a lot
of water. If the ground wasn't so porous because of the lava rock then
that much rain would rot out the roots of the trees. The high rainfall
combined with the rich, well drained soil makes ideal growing conditions for
coffee. At least it does in normal years.
Hilo, on the windward side of the island, gets far more rainfall that
Kona, which is on the leeward side. However, at just the right
location up the mountain on the Kona side, there is a small area where
the sun and rain conditions are perfectly balanced for growing coffee.
That is the Kona coffee growing region and Kona Earth farm is right in
the middle of it.
With irrigation, it's possible to grow coffee outside this region.
Unfortunately, we're too far up the mountain to get city water. With
the hard, porous lava rock, digging a well is next to impossible. We
get all our water from collecting the rain off
our roof. With 80,000 gallons of catchment capacity, that's plenty of
water for household use, coffee processing and even brief irrigation.
Catchment water doesn't work so well in an extended drought though.
Without rain, there's no way to fill the tanks. When there's enough
rain to fill the tanks, then there's no need to irrigate.
Many of our neighbors have had to start purchasing water. For a few
hundred dollars, a tanker truck will bring a load of water up to the
farm. Our primary water tank can hold several truck's worth of water.
It's impractical to purchase enough water for irrigation. Even with
city water, it costs thousands of dollars to irrigate in a normal year
and during a dry year may not even be possible to get enough water on
the trees.
The baby trees are at the biggest risk of dying. I somehow had enough
foresight to not plant many baby trees this year so I may lose a few
but not many. The mature trees that are loaded with coffee will
experience some severe dieback but they were healthy enough that I
think they'll survive. The early part of the crop was great, it's the
later part of the harvest that worries me most. I'm not worried about
quality, it's the quantity that worries me. We will definitely lose
some coffee this year because of the dry conditions. In the long run
though, as soon as the rains return, I expect the coffee trees to make
a full and happy recovery. It's just a matter of keeping things alive
until then.
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