Life at Pula: How I became a “Bean Counter”
As the new innovations and piloting lead, I carry out research and development for novel protocols and products at Pula, linking the innovations and the field operations teams. I count beans for a living. But literally, not in the accounting sense. My current mission is to overcome the challenges involved in determining coffee yields, so I have recently spent a lot of time learning how to best count coffee beans. This exercise will enable Pula to design an appropriate and affordable insurance product for farmers in this value chain.
Due to the popularity of the beverage, the global coffee market is valued at $200 billion annually. And 80% of all coffee is produced by 25 million smallholder farmers, but they are exposed to risks. Temperature fluctuations, drought, pests, and diseases — such as coffee berry disease exclusively present in Africa — all threaten coffee harvests. This presents a significant opportunity to safeguard smallholder coffee farmer livelihoods through insurance.
Pula currently insures crops ranging from cereals like rice, wheat and maize, to oilseed, legumes and more through our flagship Area Yield Index Insurance (AYII) product. These are annual crops, meaning they complete their life cycle within one growing season and need to be replanted at the beginning of the next one, which makes it easy to measure their yield. For AYII, Pula’s field agents visit farms on a single occasion during the harvest period and are able to accurately measure yields through our tried and tested methodology — crop cut experiments (CCE). This data is then compared to historical yields for that specific crop and agroecological zone to determine whether there has been a harvest loss, and whether a payout is due. Coffee, however, is a perennial crop and these do not need to be replanted each season. In Kenya, the coffee harvesting season runs for four months in a year and ripe coffee cherries are picked once a week. This makes it challenging to accurately measure coffee yields, and would require repeated visits to the same farm by field agents to conduct CCEs. This would increase the cost of yield measurements and drive up insurance premiums.
This year, with the support of a grant from the German government funded Insure Resilience Solutions Fund, I began a coffee conversion study in Tanzania to investigate how coffee yields can be measured in an efficient and feasible manner. Understanding the coffee outturn ratio is the first key step to measuring yield. It refers to the quantity of clean coffee that can be derived from a specific quantity of parchment coffee or coffee cherry, and helps to avoid loss of output. The conversion outturn ratio may be affected by inherent characteristics of the coffee plant, management processes and environmental inputs. Likewise, the diverse agro ecologies and genetic profiles of coffee contribute to differences in coffee outturn ratios.
Figure 1: Layers of a coffee cherry.
Figure 2: From left to right — parchment coffee, hulled out husks, clean green coffee beans.
The first phase of this study was conducted in the Kagera region of Tanzania in May 2022. Here, we investigated how organically grown Robusta coffee undergoes dry processing. Smallholder farmers dry the coffee at home before taking it to their local mills for processing with diesel or electricity-powered machines. The clean beans are then manually sorted into two grades: fair average quality (FAQ) which is stored by cooperatives who identify and sell to buyers, and under grade (UG) quality which farmers consume locally.
Figure 3: Dry coffee processing and measurement
This research will help us perfect our CCE methodology for coffee yield measurement, and enable accurate and fair actuarial pricing of the insurance product we offer for the crop. I am currently working on the second phase of the study investigating wet coffee processing, while the final phase will focus on green coffee bean conversion.
Before I joined Pula in 2021, I was looking for an opportunity to develop my career and create positive impact for people around the world. The coffee outturn study and the company as a whole have provided me with that and more — I have experienced different cultures, seen new parts of the world, and been surrounded by people who appreciate and challenge my skill set in equal measure.
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