JOURNAL | The Scout Program & 5-5-5 Project in Uganda
Agricultural knowledge gaps and poor farming practices permeate the Western Ugandan region of the Rwenzori Mountains. The Lunar Coffee 5-5-5 project is a contextualised approach to holistic farm/family/and environmental impact via our Coffee Scout program. We created a pool of 45 farmers from our 9 scouts in the Kasese district. To date, during this harvest season, we have seen 500 kgs of Red cherries delivered from these farmers. This coffee has been collected and processed separately.
The first sample lots have been cupped in Sweden and the results have been impressive, compared to coffee that has been received from non-5-5-5 members.
Lunar’s 9 Coffee Scouts each selected 5 Farmers. These 5 Farmers were asked to:
- Select 5 trees
- Implement Lunar Coffee agriculture best practices on those trees:
• Mulching
• Pruning
• Stumping
• De-suckering
• Soil conservation
- Count the number of Flowers during the bloom
- Count the number of Green Cherries during the year
- Count the number of Red Ripe Cherries during the Harvest
- Throughout the coffee season receive valuable training and technical insight from the Lunar Coffee Scouts.
- Integrate the start of our Farmer Field School introduction for gender inclusion, environmental impact practices and intercropping for food security.
Lykke/Lunar covered all the costs of course, and the experiment was done over one season: from bloom to harvest. The result? 3-4 points better than before.
The Scout Program
The scout program is based on our agronomist at Lunar Coffee, training locals in all best practices in coffee cultivation – how to prune your trees, how and when to fertilise, how to work with mulching and so on. With this knowledge the scouts can reach the local farmers in a completely different way by sharing and teaching producers on how to grow more and better coffee. This is where we see the biggest social and economic impact.
Social and societal impact.
Talking to the locals and producers in Rwenzori since Lunar Coffee arrived, there’s a clear and collective response: a bright future.
“From job shortage and plans on moving away, now the work opportunities have come here instead. This area has been put on the map.” Bright, who represent the voice of the youth in the sub-county committee, says.
Building and operating the process station created over 200 jobs, and Lykke is already working with over 2000 producers who get better pay for their cherries.
“You could tell that there was a mutual feeling of ‘Let’s do this!’, high ambition and overall positive winds.” Johan says brightly.
