Harvesting Coffee
A frustrating fact for coffee growers is that coffee cherries ripen at different times on the same tree.
One branch can simultaneously hold blossoms, green fruit, half-ripe berries and rosy red cherries.
That’s why on most farms, the fruit of the coffee is plucked by hand, just as has been done since time immemorial.
Pickers typically visit each tree three or four times in a season, picking only the ripe beans and leaving the green beans to be harvested at a later time.
Even some a good picker will harvest two hundred pounds of the fruit in one day.
But not all coffee picking is accomplished by hand. On large, modernized farms, common in Brazil, a harvesting machine is used to strip the tree of its fruit.
Although these machines leave the coffee plant intact, they remove all the loose cherries-both those that are ready for roasting and those that are not yet ripe.
But because such plantations operate on a massive scale, they are nevertheless able to yield a profit.
Harvesting Coffee
