supervision is necessary to prevent unripe fruit being^ 

 picked. The beans are then fermented for from 

 i8 to 36 hours, washed and dried. Great care 

 is necessary in all these operations, as on the 

 manner in which they are carried out the 

 market value of the coffee largely depends. If 

 machinery for shelling the parchment off the beans 

 and grading has not been installed, the coffee may 

 be sent to a curing works or shipped as it is "in 

 parchment." Shipping is effected in double bags 

 weighing about 200 lbs. Arrangements may be 

 made with one of several local firms engaged in the 

 work to take charge of the coffee from the time it is 

 put on rail until it has been sold in London or else- 

 where. Advances of up to 75% of the value of the 

 coffee can usually be obtained against shippmg 

 documents, a final settlement being effected on 

 receipt of the account sales from the brokers. 



COSTS. It is not yet possible to give authoritative 



figures of the costs of coffee planting. No other 

 branch of farming is subject to such widely 

 divergent estimates. This is in great part due to 

 the fact that two very different policies of planting 

 are pursued; and partly to the influence of local con- 

 ditions. The intending planter should bear this in 

 mind when during the first few weeks after his 

 arrival in the country he is apt to get bewildered by 

 the apparently contradictory information showered 

 on him. It is freely stated on the one hand that a 

 plantation of one hundred acres costs ;i^5,ooo to bring 

 to the bearing stage, and, again, that coffee need 

 not cost more than pi^io per acre if one goes the right 

 way about it. Much depends on how one goes 

 about it ! 



PRICE OF As a branch of mixed farming coffee planting is 



i,AND. not a costly undertaking : as an independent 



concern it is. Land especially suited to coffee is 

 more costly than mixed agricultural land — whereas 

 a choice selection of coffee land in such a district as 

 Kyambu would cost from £10 to £13 per acre, a 

 general purposes farm of 300 to 500 acres with from 

 one tenth to one-fourth of the area suitable for 

 coffee, in say the Nakuru district, might be had at 

 £2 to £2, per acre. Thus at the outset the man 

 whose sole object is coffee pays five times as much 



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