Manila Bulletin Agriculture reader is a Kalinga coffee advocate

It's always a pleasant surprise to come across a Manila Bulletin Agriculture reader in the wild.

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Not only was Engr. Sunshine Genevive Sacki Molinta, the proprietor of QRS Farms and administrator of Kape Aralan Training Institute, Inc. an avid reader, she also met founding editor Zac Sarian when he visited Kalinga in 2014!

Molinta began farming in 2019. She resigned from her job at the DTI after she inherited her mother's coffee farm, a former Nestle demo farm, on the outskirts of Tabuk City, Kalinga. “We started rejuvenation.”

To further her coffee education, the fourth generation farmer also joined PhilCafe, a USAID-funded non-government organization where she later served as a coffee mentor. “We’re scholars, so I’m a Q Grader, Robusta. They give us training like Q grading courses, coffee roasting courses, training courses on coffee nursery management, and good agricultural practices of coffee.”

This formed the basis of the curriculum she would later teach in Kape Aralan. “We go to the farmers directly, we don’t gather them in halls,” she explained before continuing in Tagalog, “We teach them what they need in their operations.”

After she completed her course, she concentrated on rejuvenating her farm, with the goal of establishing a training center. “As long as it had to do with coffee, if there was a training, I’d attend.”