Stir it up

“I man a farmer from creation,” Bob Marley said in an interview in 1973, making reference to his childhood days on his mother’s farm in Nine Mile, Jamaica.

Although Bob may not have realized it then, by 1973 he was already well on his way to becoming the greatest reggae musician of all times. It had been over a decade since he recorded his first single, One Cup of Coffee, and his music was beginning its infinite dominance of the world’s music charts. Almost 40 years later, his son Rohan Marley looks out over his 52-acre coffee farm in Chepstowe, Portland. Resting on the edge of Jamaica’s Blue Mountain range and cradling the banks of the Spanish River, the farm’s sloping hills are lined with lush coffee shrubs, shaded by a variety of tropical fruit and flowering trees.

“My father used to say that one day he was going to stop playing music and just farm. I am that, I am the “just farm” part. I am the other side of my father, the completion of his dream to return to farming,” Rohan says with a charming Bob Marley-like smile and slight flick of his heavy dreadlocks.

A former professional American football player, Rohan did not set out to be a farmer. When his football career ended, he became involved in his family’s Tuff Gong clothing business. In 2000, a friend told him about a beautiful property, with a river, in Jamaica’s verdant Portland Parish, which was for sale.

“I visited the property and saw the river and right then I thought this is too nice not to have, I had to have it.”

After purchasing the estate, Rohan discovered that it was once a coffee farm.

“When I saw the coffee trees and met the people, I thought of starting a farm to help the people from the community in a positive way, by creating opportunities and jobs, enhancing their lives and furthering their longevity.”

In order to stay true to the Rastafarian principles of natural living and also to improve the health of the farmers and people in the community, Rohan decided that his farm would have to be organic or “ital” a Rastafarian word for pure and natural. He met with the farmers and forbade the use of any chemicals, fertilizers or pesticides on his property. The farmers began to believe in and rigorously practise the tenets of organic farming.

Today, the Marley Coffee Estate is now on the verge of achieving its organic certification from the Jamaica Organic Agriculture Movement and its Certification of Environmental Standards from the international organization, CERES. In 2005, this sole burgeoning organic farm in Jamaica grew into Marley Coffee Inc, an international gourmet coffee company with offices in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Jamaica. Marley Coffee Inc sells an assortment of shade-grown coffee blends from certified organic and sustainable farms in Central and South America, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia as well as an organic single-origin java from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. All of the coffees are certified organic by the USDA, and the Pacific Agricultural Certification Society of Canada (PACS), and comply with the company‚Äôs ital standards of fair trade. With catchy names that evoke Bob Marley’s famous songs, such as Lively Up, Mystic Morning, One Love‚ and Simmer Down, the Marley Coffee blends have been causing a stir in US supermarkets and gourmet stores like Whole Foods and Dean and Deluca.

In 2010, Marley Coffee Inc joined the elite group of coffee companies licensed by the Coffee Board of Jamaica (CIB) to sell Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee. Since achieving its CIB license, Marley Coffee Inc has released its newest product, Talkin Blues: 100 per cent Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee and will also be launching Marley Blue Mountain Organic Coffee in the near future.

“The marriage of Blue Mountain and Marley is almost compulsory,” adds Rohan. “Together they represent the best of Jamaica. Blue Mountain Coffee is the best coffee and the Marley name has such a presence as well and the combination of the two could take the Blue Mountain Coffee even higher. We can really make it dance now.”

A version of this story by Mirah Lim appeared in MACO Caribbean Living Issue 12 Volume 4