[ad_1]
It is 11:30 in the morning and in the dining room of Camp 1 of the El Banco de Venecia coffee farm, in the Southwest of Antioquia, they are scary. Instead of human footprints or any other sign to infer the need to maintain physical distance, there are coffee grounds. All yellow and the same size, separated from each other and plotted on all surfaces: on the floor, on chairs and on tables that will be occupied only at nightfall. At that time of day the action is in the coffee plantations.
A year ago, around the same harvest time, that representation of coffee beans was not in the dining room. Neither are the new sinks or the billboards that remind us of the need to maintain minimum measures to prevent the spread of the virus. It also lowered the capacity of the rooms where they sleep (from eight to four or five) and they will try to reduce the number of staff as much as possible without risking that the date for collecting the coffee is passed and that the precious red fruit falls to the ground.
In El Banco, a farm with a million coffee sticks, there were up to 250 pickers who in other years worked simultaneously at this time. Today there are 80 because the harvest is just beginning, but they know that they will need more people and care will be key to avoid an outbreak.
Groups and more changes
Luis Eduardo Rodriguez She is Fredonita, she grew up among coffee plantations and knows like the back of her hand the process of coffee since the bush blooms between December and January and nine months later, when the green fruit turns red like a cherry. There, at the El Banco farm in La Arabia, he is the lookout and was in charge of carrying out all the procedures so that the collectors could arrive after several controls that included a screening and an evaluation of symptoms. He is in charge of the sheets and the daily temperature record marked by each of the 80 collectors.
“Today we have three groups and they are divided by camps. On the one hand there are the locals, about 25 (mostly Venetians); on the other, the people from the coast (from San Andrés de Sotavento, Córdoba) and on the other hand, the Tolima, who come from the municipality of Ortega ”, says this man who is also a technician in safety at work and who emphasizes that it has been an apprenticeship Huge plan for harvesting the crop in times of covid-19.
Another of the changes implemented has been to intersperse payments so that all the collectors do not receive the money on the same weekend and thus avoid as much as possible that the town becomes congested. Bankarization has been another bet and a pedagogical component to educate about the changes in a scenario where the bars and discos that used to frequent in other harvests on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays, rest days, are not enabled.
Time management
Before there were Rappi, Uber Eats or any other courier company on motorcycles or bicycles with multicolored drawers, there were already gariteros. These characters distribute breakfasts and lunches on mule back to those who collect cherry coffee in the sun and water: “listen to those from Tolima, batteries that are left without lunch,” shouts the man at the edge of the trail, and from the contiguous mountain men and women begin to emerge with what was collected in the morning. They tie up their bags and leave the load near the weight where the daily balance will be made. Here there are no fixed hours and you pay for what each one manages to collect.
Today, when the harvest has not yet entered its fury, the farm pays each collector $ 600 for each kilogram harvested. At this point there are people who collect 60 kilos in a single day ($ 36,000), but others can reach up to 150 or 180 kilos (108,000 pesos). From what they produce each day they must get $ 15,000 to pay for the three meals.
Echoes from the coffee plantations
Inside the mountain where it can already be collected, the landscape becomes uniform and immeasurable. Popular music plays and the day passes between laughter and complaints because the trees still do not have so many ripe fruits, so it is difficult to achieve a good production. Physical distancing is not a problem there because everyone has their own groove and it is difficult for collectors to find each other in so much space.
Carlos Madrigal He is 18 years old and traveled 15 days ago with a group of countrymen more than 500 kilometers from his native Ortega, in Tolima, to Venice, to collect coffee. It is small, but it carries one of the most prominent sacks on its shoulder:
“Still the cuts (batches) are not very good, but when the subject improves, one can collect up to 300 or 350 kilos ($ 210,000 at current value) in a day working from 5:00 in the morning until after 4:00 in the afternoon ”, says this young man who has already worked in other coffee crops and who points out that the pandemic the only thing that has changed is the restriction to go to town every weekend.
As they have to pay for the trip and bring a plant for the return home, foreigners are usually the ones who demand the most so that the sacrifice translates into more talk. So it happens to Melba romero (44 years old) also a native of Ortega and who last year was in Concordia during the coffee harvest and this 2020 returned with her husband and a group of neighbors to overcome the economic crisis.
Put down roots in Antioquia
Maria Martinez She is a native of San Andrés de Sotavento (Córdoba), is 48 years old and speaks as fast as she collects coffee. The woman spends her days in the company of her daughter Luz Herminia and tells that she got to know the coffee harvests five years ago, when she arrived in the Southwest of Antioquia, because she used to pick cotton in her native Córdoba.
“We have always liked working and after coming for several years we decided to get a little piece of land here and start building a wooden house. For now the grain is not very good, but something is done and it does not matter if it is in the sun or in the water, because in the house the children’s food does not wait ”, says this woman with glasses, mask and a red cap that protects it from the sun.
When the region is not in the coffee harvest, this woman searches for it in the fields as a laborer.
Whether they are from Tolima, Córdoba or Antioquia, they all aspire that in a matter of two weeks the abundance of red fruits is such that the amount produced in one day is doubled or tripled and they have weeks where they can get up to 500.00 pesos free of expenses fixed representing meals.
Well says the Secretary of Government of Venice, Juan David Restrepo, when talking about the importance of the coffee harvest for the economic recovery of the region: coffee growers (producers and collectors) await this season with the anxiety that a child awaits for his Christmas Eve gift. For now Christmas has not arrived, but it seems that the novenas have already begun.
[ad_2]
