The afternoon we spent looking at coffee plantations will become a Nuffield highlight for me. Those of you who know me well, know that I am an avid coffee drinker but this was the first time I have been able to see how it is actually produced. The videos and books I've seen, don’t do it justice. The plants are a beautiful deep green and grow to be easily 3.5 metres high (12 feet). The span out on the hillsides north of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state like vineyards in Bourges, France. The fruit becomes a deep red just before it is ready for harvest and it was harvest time while I was there. 
This particular plantation dries the coffee and bags it before selling. The fruit is harvested by these machines that are massive and drive over the hedges of coffee plants, a hopper has to drive along the next row to collect the beans from the machine. After the harvester goes through the field another machine goes along and sweeps the ground under the plants to pick up any missed fruit to minimize waste. 
The coffee is spread out on concrete terraces to dry for a few days until it is at about 20% moisture then moved to the wood furnace fuelled driers where it is taken down to 11 - 12%. It is then sorted, skins are removed (to be used as organic matter back on the fields mixed with manure) and bagged to be sold to a distribution co-op.
This plantation harvests only every two years and after harvest prunes all the plants back and lets them rest a year. Typical coffee plants will produce a good crop one year only once every two years. The opposite year is a much poorer result.
Coffee was much bigger in this region years ago but sugarcane has replaced a lot of the production which seems like a shame but renting the land to sugarcane companies is much easier for an ageing farm population. The similarity to vineyards surprised me and the smell coming from the coffee driers was something else; a sort of heaven for this coffee lover.
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