For around a billion people around the world, drinking coffee is a daily routine.
However , what many coffee lovers may not know is that they often drink a drink made, at least in part, with Brazilian beans.
“The Brazilian bean has popular characteristics and is known for its body and sweetness,” says Christiano Borges, head of the country's largest producer, Ipanema Coffees.
“That’s why many coffee blends around the world use our coffee as a base.”
Brazil is by far the world's largest producer of coffee beans. It accounts for more than a third of all global supplies .
Around 70% of Brazil's coffee plants are the high-priced Arabica species used in fresh coffee. The remaining 30% is Robusta, used mainly for instant coffee.
Ipanema cafes. Brazil's largest coffee plantations stretch for miles on end.
Brazil's largest coffee producers are increasingly turning to technology to help them successfully grow and process the best possible crop, both in terms of size and quality.
New Tech Economy is a series that explores how technological innovation is poised to shape the emerging new economic landscape.
One of these companies, Okuyama, states that it is investing at least 10% of its revenues in technology. Based in Minas Gerais, it has coffee plantations covering 1,100 hectares.
His team uses a computer application called Cropwise Protector, made by Swiss-Chinese agricultural technology company Syngenta.
Linked to terrestrial sensors and satellite images, the tool offers agricultural workers a visual analysis of the farm, or plantation, on a tablet or laptop.
They can then quickly apply things like drip irrigation or pest control to a very specific area that might need it, rather than an entire field or entire farm.
The idea is that this much more targeted approach is much faster and more environmentally friendly.
They also invest in technologies for the coffee drying process, where it is possible to monitor the temperature, which is defined by the type of coffee being dried.
Okuyama dries some of its coffee beans in drum heaters after harvest to prevent them from spoiling while they are stored before roasting. Getting the temperature and time right is essential to avoid wasting both grain and energy used to power the heaters.
At Ipanema Coffees, which has 4,300 hectares of plantations in three locations in Minas Gerais, Borges says that the company has also followed the technology path in recent years.
“We made a big investment in semi-automatic irrigation, where the system measures water deficit and weather conditions, giving us recommendations for each area.”
He adds that the investments are helping the company reduce the impact of climate change. “We have climate problems, such as droughts and increases in global temperatures.
"The irrigation system helped us improve our productivity... and became climate insurance for us."
Ipanema says it also has trackers on all its tractors to measure productivity and is another user of Cropwise Protector. “This helps us monitor agricultural pests, using just a tablet”, says Gustavo Michalski, the company's agricultural coordinator.
“This allows us to manage the problem and make more assertive and sustainable decisions, as we can monitor the indicators that give us the location and intensity of a given problem in each area.”
After harvesting the grains, Ipanema has been using automated selection machines for several years, which select only the ripe, yellow and red grains.
Ipanema. Machine in Ipanema can automatically reject unripe grains
“We configure the machine by programming the colors we need,” says Rodrigo Ferreira, the company’s industrial director. “As soon as we place the grains on the conveyor belt, the grains that do not have the color we defined will be expelled by a jet of compressed air.”
Flora Viana, global marketing manager for digital agriculture at Syngenta, says Brazil's coffee producers “can no longer increase their productivity just by buying more land”.
“We are reaching the limit of available areas”, she adds, “producers need, instead, to optimize their production process”.
Flora Viana says that perhaps Brazilian coffee farmers can continue expanding because there is no more suitable land.
However, Borges adds that the technology depends on trained personnel. “There’s no point in having a great tool if we don’t have a motivated and prepared team for it.”
However, this increase in the use of technology is not universal among coffee producers in Brazil. Although it has been adopted by major industry players such as Ipanema and Okuyama, the myriad of small producers who produce 66% of the country's harvest still lag behind. But with technological advances and access to quality internet in rural environments, more producers will have access to new tools and the hope is that soon most of these producers will be able to adopt these new technologies and improve the quality of their coffees.
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