Bear Market is delighted to start what we hope will be a long lasting relationship with the Long Miles project.
THE LONG MILES SCOUTS are grassroots community changers who take coffee quality very seriously. They are a team of twenty-six young Burundians who live in the hills where coffee is grown. Together with the team of Long Miles agronomists, the Coffee Scouts come up with innovative and home-grown solutions to fight the threat of the potato defect, mitigate the effects of climate change on soil health and empower farmers with the tools they need to produce quality coffee. The Coffee Scouts play an important role as liaisons between Long Miles and our neighbouring farming communities. They got their name the day they left on their first mission, armed with spray bottles of organic pesticide to scout for antestia bugs, the colourful bug linked to the potato taste defect, in farmers’ coffee trees. Th e team of Coffee Scouts are involved in many seasonal projects, but are committed to serving the coffee farming community all year round.
Each Coffee Scout works with a group of farmer friends from the hill they work on, committing to help them understand and use better agricultural practices. Together with farmers, the Coffee Scouts set up Farmer Field Schools which are small model coffee farms. At these farms, anyone in the community can come to practice farming techniques, ask questions, and learn. During coffee harvest season the Coffee Scouts can be found in the fi eld, guiding farmers through selective cherry picking or at the washing stations, helping with farmer reception and coffee cherry quality control. Long aft er coff ee harvest has ended, you’ll still find the Coffee Scouts in the hills teaching communities of coffee growers the importance of mulching and fertilizing the soil, growing green manures, planting indigenous shade trees, and seasonally pruning their coffee trees. What started as a pilot project has grown into an intrical part of who we are.
The Coffee Scouts have been pivotal in preparing our seedling coffee nurseries, as well as distributing and planting indigenous trees for our Trees For Kibira project. The Coffee Scouts have high hopes for our coffee and for improving the lives of the farmers who grow it. They are continuously growing as leaders and mobilizers in their communities. Their innovation and positivity is the beginning of a better future being realized for generations of coffee farmers in Burundi.
What sets this hill apart from others in the region is the number of blacksmiths hand-crafting metal into knives and farming tools. THE SCOUTS Emery, Suavis and Peter are three Coffee Scouts working alongside coffee farming families on Gaharo hill. Together, they have been empowering farmers with sustainable farming practices, helping them to plant shade trees and green manures, mulch their land and seasonally prune their coffee trees.
In 2014 we planted three farms on Gitwe and Nkonge Hills, directly adjacent to our Heza Washing Station. Situated at 2,100 meters above sea level, our Gitwe Hill farm is 2.85 hectares and has 7,095 heirloom bourbon trees. That is, by all measures, a very large Burundian coffee farm. Continue along a dirt road from there and you will come to two adjacent farms on Nkonge hill. These farms, together, are 2.34 hectares in size and contain 5,334 coffee trees. Our first and very small harvest from these farms was in 2017. In 2018 we had a sizable harvest and since then, we have experienced nice yields from these plots. In 2020 and 2021 our farms contained an impressively large harvest even though yields were drastically down across the country.
