Expectations of Brazil’s coffee crop in 2023 fall

Brazilian coffee growers and experts have lowered expectations for next year’s coffee crop in the world’s biggest producer, following predominantly negative post-bloom developments in many of the areas they oversee.

According to them, the initial expectations of an increase in production next year now seem distant, with converging perspectives for a crop similar in size to that harvested this year.

Higher production in Brazil next season was being considered by most international traders. It was one of the factors behind a recent drop in arabica coffee benchmark prices.

“We expected an increase in productivity [for 2023], but we changed our minds after the development of flowering,” said Paulo Armelin, who cultivates 220 hectares of coffee in the Cerrado Mineiro region.

He said the trees failed to convert many of the flowers that appeared when the rains returned in October into fruit, possibly because they were not healthy enough after a very dry winter in Brazil.

Armelin expected to harvest around 45 bags of 60 kg per hectare next year, compared to 27 bags harvested this year. Now he is seeing yields next season in the 25-30 bags/ha range.

Jonas Ferraresso, an agronomist who advises coffee farms in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, said that many trees did not have enough leaves to sustain the post-flowering period, resulting in lower fruit loads.

“It will be far from the 2020 record,” he said.

Carlos Augusto Rodrigues de Melo, president of Cooxupé, Brazil’s largest coffee cooperative and country’s biggest exporter, told local media this week that the new crop will be similar in size to the previous two, both impacted by adverse weather conditions.

José Braz Matiello, a researcher at the Procafé Foundation, shares the view of a smaller-than-expected harvest next year, saying that the trees did not have enough energy to hold back the big flowering, losing much of it before the fruits appeared.

With information from Forbes