Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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COFFEEGROWING PIONEER Before planting coffee, Ruskey had been growing rare, exotic fruits—as well as avocados—for 15 years on his 650-foot-elevation, organic-certified farm in Goleta, Calif., just outside of Santa Barbara. Items grown on the farm—such as lychee, longan and cherimoya, along with passionfruit vines—are in high demand at restaurants in the region and are sold at the Santa Barbara Farmers Market each week, as well as sold on a Web store and shipped across the country. Yet Ruskey craved a new challenge and set his sights on growing coffee, a feat that many people doubted could be accomplished on continental U.S. soil. (Hawaii is a well-known coffeegrowing region.) Ruskey knew his location near the ocean had potential: "The plants need a coastal climate protecting them from extreme temperatures of frost and high heat," he says. "Specific locations on the coast of California can potentially support the productive trees." He persisted, and soon the fruits of his labor emerged. Cherries blossomed on the coffee plants (which take around five years to mature) as they shot up, and he expanded the farm into 500 mature coffee trees planted beneath avocado trees to curtail potentially damaging coastal winds. Ruskey also planted the coffee plants in close proximity to trees growing dragon fruit and passion fruit. "They're interacting with crops I already have—that's my strategy," he says. "Wind is one of the enemies of fruit trees. You like to have a little bit of shelter there. Avocados need full sun, so coffee trees are a nice companion." The last harvest season yielded 350 pounds of green coffee. What makes Santa Barbara County an ideal spot for growing coffee, Ruskey says, is the lack of freezing temperatures or a blanket frost that would kill off plant life. Also, coastal temperatures rarely experience high upticks (say, more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit) that would put stress on the coffee plants. The first coffee beans from Good Land Organics were harvested, roasted and bagged in 2008. Processing is done on site with equipment purchased from Central America coffee farms, including a de-pulper, de-huller, fermentation tank and drying racks. Roasting is now done on site, too, by Lindsey McManus, an employee of the farm. (Down the line, Ruskey would like to invite guest roasters to roast in small batches.) McManus cut her teeth on a coffee farm in Hawaii, and when she first heard about Ruskey's efforts to grow coffee stateside, she emailed him to ask if she could volunteer in the greenhouse. That led to a staff job. "I didn't know how to apply (the Hawaii experience) in a job except for in a café," she says. "We have a lot of fun learning about coffee together. Jay's a progressive farmer—he nails it." So what does Good Land's coffee actually taste like? Ruskey says PHOTO BY FRAN COLLIN E ight years ago, Jay Ruskey shrugged off dozens of naysayers—who proclaimed, loudly, that coffee could never grow in California—and planted 45 coffee trees. A new-crop feasibility study done through the University of California helped show him how to propagate coffee plants from seed, as well as how to best harvest and market the coffee, and soon enough the project was off the ground. "It's basically been a crash course," admits Ruskey, whose 40-acre organic farm, Good Land Organics, is the first successful commercial coffee farm in the continental United States. "I'm one of those guys who is always growing something new. Years ago I was a closet coffee grower, but now this year I can come out." continued on page 38 freshcup.com February 2013 37