In the words of the head of Brazil’s largest coffee coop Cooxupe, Joaquim Libanio, “Any attempt to put a number on the new crop (now) is just a crap shoot.”

Unlike many coffee producing countries, Brazil’s coffee belt goes through a peak and trough of production every other year in what’s called its biennial cycle. The current season that ended a 32 million bag harvest in July was a low output year as trees recovered from the bumper crop of 42.5 million bags in the previous year, by official estimates. If we crudely take the 27.6 percent upward swing between the 2005/06 crop of 33.3 million bags and the 42.5 million bag crop of 2006/07 and apply it to the current crop looking forward to the new crop we get the number 40.8 million bags.

As most in the coffee world know, Brazil’s spring monsoon rains came late, but with some regularity, in October. The coffee industry in the world’s top producer and exporter is now trying to map out how uniform the rains have been and how the trees are responding to new moisture after several months of drought-stress.

I had planned a trip to document the coffee flowering after the first rains but was surprised to find out when I called cooperatives and producers to arrange the trip into south Minas Gerais, still in the first week of rains, that flowers were already falling off. Coffee blooms form, open and fall off within a week of the first rains. More cycles of blooms follow but they are normally not as intense as the first round.

Photos posted on blogs by local agromists seem to provide evidence that not all is well with the coffee trees in south Minas and Sao Paulo, despite the now regular rainfall. Many of the trees lack sufficient foliage to provide the necessary photosynthetic support for the profuse flowering and the eventual fruit that will be formed by the blooms. As a result the trees have a natural culling mechanism that aborts flowers when leaf coverage is inadequate.