UCC Hawaii

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 5 yield, operational efficiency, and final product quality. With two coffee plant diseases currently threatening Hawaii’s Kona region – coffee leaf rust and coffee berry borer – there’s clearly a long-term advantage for them to modernize their coffee cultivation processes. “We’ve had economic recessions but with the support of UCC Japan, we have always survived,” Sadumiano admits. “One of the main challenges we’ve had to face is coffee borer, which has been ravaging coffee since around 2010. We’re now pulling through that. This is the first year that we were able to come up with this much Extra Fancy since the start of the CBB infestation. Most of our green beans, they came up to Number One, which is a grade higher than Prime coffee.” The coffee borer, a small beetle native to Africa, is of particular concern when it comes to Kona coffee because of its small harvest size. Managing the highly contagious, crop-killing coffee leaf rust (CLR) disease, the most recent pathogen to hit all major Hawaiian islands, has been another major struggle for the Estate and a primary focus of research for Japanese coffee conglomerate, UCC. To that end, UCC Japan’s Research Division has teamed up with another Japanese company to provide satellite imagery analysis to the Kona plantation. “We know a lot about our harvest from these satellite images,” Kobayashi says. “We can check the coffee trees themselves just from the pictures, so we can understand the ‘where and when’ of the diseases. We can also get a sense of this year’s yield of Kona coffee, as well as forecast future crop yields.” “We’re more on the defensive side now with the coffee leaf,” Sadumiano reveals. “We’ve just got to maintain the farm with proper management and adequate nutrition for the coffee trees, because everybody has the rust now in Kona.” The USDA is providing support by conducting further