Philippines Coffee Farmers Earn More From Collecting Civet Coffee Dung

Civet, a small nocturnal mammal native to tropical Asia, was used to be hunt down and killed for their meat, but after Philippines’ farmers discovered their droppings from eating coffee beans were being bought triple the price of regular coffee beans, they were now being sought to thrive in Philippines coffee farms or farmers feed them coffee beans in their cages because their dung help bring farmers a small fortune for their coffee produce, abs-cbn news said.

Civet eats the outer layers of the coffee fruit but the bean inside passes through its stomach where enzymes and acids work to remove the bitter after taste and give it ‘a distinctive fruity aroma,’ that coffee fans in Manila pay $7 a cup, but three times that price at $49 for two cups were being paid by customers in a Heirloom Coffee shop in Massachusetts.

A local coffee farmer, Rustico Montenegro, said he and his wife could collect up to eight kilograms of civet coffee dung in their farm during peak season in the months between March and May. After washing them in a nearby natural spring it could fetch a price as high as $230 a day, a fortune in a country where a quarter of a million live in one dollar a day.

Montenegro said he sells his coffee to Vie and Basil Reyes, who stumbled on the exotic coffee dung brew while working on a project to save the ‘sugar palm tree’ and now has become the Philippines largest exporter of the product.

Their company called Bote Central exports three tons of civet coffee product annually to its buyers across Asia and the United States, including South Korea and Taiwan.

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/-depth/10/30/11/ph-farmers-cash-civet-coffee-dung