One of the biggest challenges to harvesting coffee is the topography of the land. Coffee often requires great altitudes, and frequently farms are situated along slopes in mountainous areas (though, this isn’t always the case).

Machine Harvesting

In Brazil, there are large areas of land that have requisite altitude for coffee growing. The estates in these areas drive large machines down neat rows of coffee trees to harvest the cherries. The machines essentially shake the trees until the fruit comes loose.

This method isn’t without its downsides, the biggest of which is collecting fruit before it is ripe. The cherries on the branches of a coffee tree ripen at different rates, so each branch has both ripe and unripe cherries together. The machines do not differentiate and pick all the cherries at once. This means they must be sorted after harvest to separate the ripe from the unripe, and to discard the twigs and leaves that also get shaken off the tree. The cost of the coffee’s production will be lower than any other harvesting method, but at the expense of quality of the harvest as a whole.

Strip Picking

One of the faster methods of picking coffee by hand is strip picking, in which pickers strip all the cherries off a branch together with one deft movement. Just like with machine harvesting, this is a quick but imprecise way to pick the cherries. It doesn’t require any expensive equipment or flat land, but still results in a mixed bag of ripe and unripe cherries that must then be sorted after harvest.

Hand Picking

Hand picking is the most effective way of harvesting high-quality coffee. Pickers select only the cherries that are ready for harvest, leaving the unripe fruit on the tree to be picked later. This is labor-intensive, and farmers face the added challenge of incentivising the pickers to harvest only the ripe fruit, since pickers are generally paid by weight. Quality-conscious producers have to work carefully with picking teams to make sure they are also paid for uniform ripeness.

Labor Problems

The cost of hand-picking coffee is a significant challenge and contributes a large part of the production costs. This is one of the primary reasons that coffees produced in developed economies (think Kona coffee produced in Hawaii) are so expensive. In rapidly developing countries, people are less motivated to pick coffee for a living.

Coffee farms in Central America often employ itinerant pickers, or those workers who travel from country to country, as different regions harvest at slightly different times. Nicaragua is a source for many of these workers, as it is the weakest economy in the region.

Sorting after Harvest

After harvesting the cherries, they are sorted using a variety of different methods to prevent unripe or overripe coffee from joining the bulk of the lot. In parts of the world with relatively low labor costs, and little money available for investment in equipment, this is done by hand.

In more developed countries, the cherries are often sorted using a flotation tank. The cherries are poured into a large tank of water, where the ripe fruit sinks to the bottom. They are pumped from there into the main processing section. Unripe fruit floats to the top and is skimmed off to be processed separately.