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Something I accidentally found while scrolling
So I was just randomly browsing and somehow ended up reading about the Dutch and coffee in Bengkulu — my own hometown — and honestly I never knew this before.
Turns out the Dutch actually brought arabica here first. They planted it, tried to run it as a colonial crop. But then sometime in the late 1800s a disease called coffee leaf rust just wiped out almost all the arabica across Indonesia. They tried replacing it with something else, didn’t work. Eventually they brought in robusta — more resistant, grows fine at lower altitude — and it spread fast across southern Sumatra, Bengkulu included.
So basically the reason I’m a robusta farmer today goes back to a disease that hit 150 years ago. The Dutch didn’t plan for robusta here, it just ended up being what survived.
One thing I also found — apparently there’s actually a small arabica plantation in a place called Mangkuraja, still here in Bengkulu province. Didn’t even know that existed. Might have to go look for it someday.
Funny how you learn things about your own place from the internet at midnight 😄
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