The Long Miles Coffee Scouts are grassroots community changers who take coffee quality very seriously. They are a team of twenty-six young Burundians who live in the hills where coffee is grown. Together with the team of Long Miles agronomists, the Coffee Scouts come up with innovative and home-grown solutions to fight the threat of the potato defect, mitigate the effects of climate change on soil health and empower farmers with the tools they need to produce quality coffee.
The Coffee Scouts play an important role as liaisons between Long Miles and our neighboring farming communities. They got their name the day they left on their first mission, armed with spray bottles of organic pesticide to scout for antestia bugs, the colorful bug linked to the potato taste defect, in farmers’ coffee trees.
The team of Coffee Scouts are involved in many seasonal projects but are committed to serving the coffee farming community all year round. Each Coffee Scout works with a group of farmer friends from the hill they work on, committing to help them understand and use better agricultural practices. Together with farmers, the Coffee Scouts set up Farmer Field Schools which are small model coffee farms. At these farms, anyone in the community can come to practice farming techniques, ask questions, and learn.
During coffee harvest season the Coffee Scouts can be found in the field, guiding farmers through selective cherry-picking or at the washing stations, helping with farmer reception and coffee cherry quality control. Long after coffee harvest has ended, you’ll still find the Coffee Scouts in the hills teaching communities of coffee growers the importance of mulching and fertilizing the soil, growing green manures, planting indigenous shade trees, and seasonally pruning their coffee trees.
What started as a pilot project has grown into an intricate part of who we are. The Coffee Scouts have been pivotal in preparing our seedling coffee nurseries, as well as distributing and planting indigenous trees for our Trees For Kibira project. The Coffee Scouts have high hopes for our coffee and for improving the lives of the farmers who grow it. They are continuously growing as leaders and mobilizers in their communities. Their innovation and positivity is the beginning of a better future being realized for generations of coffee farmers in Burundi, and beyond.
The Long Miles Coffee Scouts program will be launched in Uganda by the end of 2020 and launched in Kenya by 2021.