Long Miles Burundi Cowshed Program
Community Giveback: Burundi Long Miles Coffee Project
Long Miles Coffee Project (LMCP) is a social Enterprise coffee company operating in Burundi since 2013. Their vision is to see a thriving local coffee farming community in Burundi producing some of the world’s best coffee by connecting small hills of coffee farming families with roasters who believe that exceptional coffee includes traceability, unique micro climates and the power of the human spirit.
To achieve this, they build relationships with families of coffee growers, growing LMCPs trees right alongside theirs. They listen to the struggles and search for ways to bring solutions by developing social projects. In fact, Burundi coffee is known to be high quality and well appreciated by buyers, Roasters and consumers. However, the coffee production in Burundi is much subjected to different limiting factors among which, we note, the lack of fertilizers, soil acidity, lack of farmer knowledge connected to the outdated mindsets, and severe climate effects. While other countries estimate an average of coffee yield at 5 to 7 kgs per tree, that of Burundi country is still nationally estimated in average at 1 kg/tree.
In order to contribute to the increase of the coffee yields to the farmers LMCP partnerS with, a set of programs and projects are yearly implemented. Some of these are run using the Farmer Field School (FFS) and the Producer Integrated Plan (PIP), in order to help farmers change their minds and practices.
The FFS approach has thus helped around 200 farmers to change their practices and led 42% of these to double or triple their yields within 3 years.
As for PIP approach, it is obviously helping farmers to increase their revenues in way they would not think. Some have seen that per every 1$US invested; they made up to 5 $US.
The FFS approach is basically used to improve practices in a coffee farm by improving soil health. To be very effective, the approach implies the use of organic manure. This requires having livestock made of cows, goats, pigs, etc. However, the low economic situation enduring within communities, does not allow coffee farmers to come up effectively with that solution. Signal that even those who produce the organic manure, they use it to fertilize soils dedicated to other crops than coffee.
Implementing this modern cow breeding project would highly and effectively help farmers as it will create a room for learning.
Demonstration plots will thus be created and will help farmers to learn about results and then apply the practice for themselves in their coffee fields.
In Addition, the project will also help to create another program formally known ‘’Community solidarity chain’’. This program will help farmers benefit new borns, cows or goats for their household and get able to produce manure to use for fertilizing their coffee.
We thus hope that beneficiaries will get able to triple or quadruple the yields of their coffee plantations. The funding for this modern cow breeding project, or Cowshed, will come directly from the Community Giveback program and we are eager to see it’s implementation and affect on the community.