Fixing things and finishing projects.
18 January 2010
The holiday season is always a busy time of year for us. We often have
house guests, it's the middle of the harvest season and it's the
busiest time of year for coffee sales. So that's my excuse for not
making any posts over the past month. To catch up, I want to brag
about a couple things I did manage to get done recently.
The new coffee storage room is complete and has
already proven itself to be very effective and useful. It's main
purpose is to store coffee in a controlled environment where the
humidity and temperature are held constant at exactly the desired
conditions. Being stored in such prime conditions, our coffee stays
nice and fresh.
Very few farms have such nice storage facilities. Most Kona coffee
farms are too small to justify a special storage room. They either
rely on large plastic bags or they simply put the coffee in a garage or
closet and hope for the best. The large mills process so much coffee
that they need giant warehouses. Cooling and dehumidifying such large
warehouses is not practical so the mills often ship their coffee to the
mainland for storage. That means it is stored as green beans rather
than parchment which is less than ideal.
Our coffee storage room also has a special coffee chute. The top deck
of the barn is used for drying the coffee while the basement room is
for storage. When the coffee is dry it is raked into a hatch which
leads down to the storage room. Using the chute is much, much easier
than scooping up the coffee and carrying the heavy bags down the stairs.
In addition to finishing the storage room, I've also managed to get my
tractor and manure spreader working again.
That is good because with
them both broken, the pulped coffee skins were piling up fast. Fixing
the manure spreader required some parts fabrication so I fixed the
tractor first. Once the tractor was running, I could use it to scoop
up all the rotting cherry skins and carry them out to the field. It
still required some shoveling but not nearly as bad as it would have
been if the tractor was broken.
I eventually managed to get the manure spread back together too. I
might have gone slightly overboard with it. I spent so much time
cleaning and repainting everything, getting it all nice and shiny, that
once it was done I didn't want to fill it with messy coffee skins. It
had to be done though. After all, it is a manure spreader. They
work better when they're slimy and stinky and dripping with ooze.
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