Picking Coffee on a Bogota Plantation
Methods of planting, cultivation, gathering, and preparing the Colombian coffee crop for the market are substantially those that are common in all coffee-producing countries, although they differ in some small particulars. About 700 trees are usually planted to the acre, and native trees furnish the necessary shade. The average yield is one pound per tree per year.
While Coffea arabica has been mostly cultivated in Colombia, as in the other countries of South America, the liberica variety has not been neglected. Seeds of the liberica tree were planted here soon after 1880, and were moderately successful. Since 1900, more attention has been given to liberica, and attempts have been made to grow it upon banana and rubber plantations, which seem to provide all the shade protection that is needed. Liberica coffee trees begin to bear in their third year. From the fifth year, when a crop of about 650 pounds to the acre can reasonably be expected, the productiveness steadily increases until after fifteen or sixteen years, when a maximum of over one thousand pounds an acre is attained.
Antioquia is the largest coffee producing department in the republic, and its coffee is of the highest grade grown. Medellin, the capital, where the business interests of the industry are concentrated, is a handsome white city located on the banks of the Aburra river, in a picturesque valley that is overlooked by the high peaks of the Andean range. It is a town of about 80,000 inhabitants, thriving as a manufacturing center, abundant in modern improvements, and is the center of a coffee production of 500,000 bags known in the market as Medellin and Manizales. Another center in this coffee region is the town of Manizales, perched on the crest of the Andean spurs to dominate the valley extending to Medellin and the Cauca valley to the Pacific. There-about many small coffee growers are settled, and several hundred thousand bags of the beans pass through annually.
One of the interesting plantations of the country was started a few years ago in a remote region by an enterprising American investor. It was located on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains 3,000 to 5,000 feet above sea-level, about twenty-five miles from the city of Santa Marta. An extended acreage of forest-covered land was acquired, about 600 acres of which were cleared and either planted in coffee or reserved for pasturage and other kinds of agriculture. When the plantation came to maturity, it had nearly 300,000 trees. In 1919, there were 425,000 trees producing 3,600 hundred-weight of coffee.
A typical Colombian plantation is the Namay, owned by one of the bankers of the Banco de Colombia of Bogota. It is located a good half day's travel by rail and horseback from the city, about 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. There are 1,000 acres in the plantation, with 250,000 trees having an ultimate productive capacity of nearly 2,000 bags a year. During crop times, which are from May to July, about two hundred families are needed on an estate of this size.
Venezuela. Seeds of the coffee plant were brought into Venezuela from Martinique in 1784 by a priest who started a small plantation near Caracas. Five years later, the first export of the bean was made, 233 bags, or about 30,000 pounds. Within fifty years, production had increased to upward of 50,000,000 pounds annually; and by the end of the nineteenth century, to more than 100,000,000 pounds.