Post-harvest handling and quality assurance of organic coffee products on household income in Kagamba Sub-County, Rakai district

Abstract

Coffee is one of the most important agricultural commodities in the world. The coffee quality is associated with pre-harvest and post-harvest management activities. Each step starting from selecting the best coffee variety for plantation until the final coffee drink preparation determines the cupping quality. A descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted to investigate the economic losses of post-harvest handling of coffee on the household income of farmers in Kagamba sub-county, Rakai district. The specific objectives of this study were to characterize coffee farmers examine the influence of different post-harvest handling technologies on household income, to identify the different technologies used in post-harvest handling of coffee and to determine the constraints faced by coffee farmers in KagambaSub-county, Rakai district. Primary data were obtained from the month of October to December 2020 through householdsurvey usingdirect interviews, focus group discussions and semi-structured questionnaire administered to a randomly selected sample of 120 smallholder farmer respondents. The survey data were entered and analysedin SPSS statistical package where simple descriptive and inferential statistics were run. The results revealed that the household characteristics determine the postharvest handling practices for example farmer’s age, gender, marital status, education level, extension contact, household laboursize.The results also show that post-harvest handling technologies likeproper harvesting,properCoffee Drying andproper storage improves farmer’s house hold income. The different technologies used in post-harvest handling of coffee were the dry process method, 80% of coffee growers were practicing the dry process and most farmers use sacks as their storage bags. The constraints faced by coffee farmers included the lack of affordable financial credit services (30%); poor agronomic practices; limited extensions services due to the limited linkages with research and development institutions. The key policy recommendation from this study is that there should be increased investment in farmer training of Post-harvest handling and quality assurance of organic coffee products technologies through improving the farmers’ capacity will greatly increase farmers’ income.