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Coffee beans are one of the most-farmed products in Nicaragua. Sadly, men and women labor all day picking and preparing them and get pennies in return. Not all of these photos are my best work and one of them (the one with me in it) wasn't even taken by me, but from start to finish they show the story of a coffee bean from tree to manufacturing plant. Enjoy!
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Step 1: Pick the coffee beans
For pennies a day, Nicaraguan workers slave away in the heat picking ripe coffee beans off of the coffee trees into canastas (wooden baskets) that hang around their necks. These baskets often weigh nearly 50 pounds before they go and dump the picked beans into giant bolsas (bags).
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Step 2: Packing up and weighing the bags
After a hard day's work, the bean-pickers bring their day's haul to the owner of the finca (plantation) to be weighed in. The photo to the left is a bag full of coffee beans and two of the canastas used to harvest the beans.
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Step 3: The red beans vs the green beans
Once the beans are back at the finca, the first sorting process begins. Often during the picking process, a worker will pick green coffee beans along with the red ones. Unfortunately, only the red ones are good to make into quality coffee, so workers sometimes have to sort out the beans by colors...a long and tedious task.
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Step 4: Shucking the beans
Before becoming the roasted dark product you are used to, coffee beans are in the middle of a cascara (the skin around the bean) that must be shucked off. Fortunately, farmers have machines to do this for them. After dumping pounds of coffee into the machine, a worker turns a wheel that grinds the soft pulp off the bean and separates the two parts.
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Step 5: Washing the beans
Once shucked, the excess cascara must be washed off of the beans. While larger coffee manufacturing plants have machines to do this, smaller farmers must do this by hand. This is often made harder by the scarcity of water in the area.
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Step 6: Drying the beans
After sorting by color, shucking the cascara off and washing the beans, they are then placed in these wooden drying racks and left in the sun for a few days. Every few hours the beans must be moved around to ensure that the wet ones on the bottom are moved up to bask in the sun's fierce heat.
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Step 7: Sorting the dry beans
Once dry, you still have to escojer (sort) the beans. This entails standing over the wooden crates of beans for hours-on-end in the blazing sun picking out the black, bright white or misshaped beans and tossing them aside. Only properly formed and off-white colored beans will make it to the next phase. The rejected ones will be used to make coffee for the finca owner.
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Step 8: Packing up and selling the bags
Once the beans are sorted and the premium product is seperated from the rest, the beans are put back into the giant 150 pound sacks and brought into town to the local coffee distributor. These bags that have taken around a week to produce are then sold for roughly $5.
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Step 9: The coffee fields
The coffee's journey is long from finished once it leaves the farmer's hands. Once it is sold to the distributor the coffee is transported to areas further to the south of Nicaragua where there is less rain and harsher heat. The bags are laid out in giant rows in a field to continue drying before being processed, roasted and turned into the cup of joe that gets you going every morning.
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