Non-stop rain in the second half of 2009 deprived trees of a dry spell, which synchronises the trees by putting them in a kind of stand-by mode before rains arrive to stir them and prompt them to produce flowers simultaneously. Months down the line that means coffee fruit ripens roughly at the same time, ready to be stripped from the branches. This year though, farmers expect to harvest ripe and unripe cherries together due to erratic flowering caused by the rain.
"There will be a very irregular harvest because of this, Today you have well developed cherries and chumbinhos (small cherries)," said Eder Vanuci, a trader at CafePocos, a co-operative in Brazil's main coffee state Minas Gerais. From Minas to northern Sao Paulo state's coffee areas to Parana, once Brazil's coffee heartland, farmers and co-operatives say they have observed coffee tree branches with flowers and small buds alongside ripening fruit.
There is no real problem with the quality of the produce on the trees, but the harm will be done when farmers' labourers or machine harvesters gather the fruit in a few sweeps of the fields rather than picking each cherry as it ripens. "The price would have to be three times higher to collect the beans only when they are ready," Vanuci said. Harvesting costs have risen steeply in the last few years and scurrying between hundreds of trees to pluck only ripe fruit would be costly.
Much green, unripe fruit is likely to be gathered with the ripe red cherries, and will need to be separated using flotation in water and used in lower quality products because of the astringent taste of the unripe beans. The last six months have been unusually wet in tropical south-eastern Brazil and one weather forecaster estimated rainfall was about one third more than usual in 2009. According to Climatempo meteorologists, January in Sao Paulo was the wettest in more than 60 years.
The rains also caused havoc during last year's harvest, soaking harvested beans farmers had spread out to dry and making them ferment and spoil. Growers have estimated anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of that crop was affected. Agronomist Cesar Candiano from the Cooparaiso co-operative near northern Sao Paulo's coffee area, said farmers had to work out a strategy to gather the most possible ripe fruit to obtain better quality, but said this would not be easy.
"The farmer can't wait too long to go and pick it as it will be a big harvest," Candiano said. Fruit can begin to deteriorate after it has ripened if not gathered in time. Candiano said those using mechanised harvesters could calibrate them to strip only the upper part of the tree where the fruit ripens earliest and go back later to strip the lower branches. But few farmers own the expensive machines and those available for hire can be hard to get hold of. "I am not pessimistic (about the crop quality) but I think the farmer will have to be very careful when he goes into the fields. He will have to plan," Candiano said.