You're definitely correct. Unless we imagine his plot in some sort weird vacuum, with magic sides and amazing yield in the corners.

That's a good point Stephen, mechanical harvesting does mean there must be a percentage of under and over ripe cherries collected at the same time. So to help solve this issue the first thing people try to achieve is a simultaneous ripening across entire plots, using a genius system of irrigation control: irrigating consistently throughout budding, stressing the tree by not irrigating just before flowering for about three weeks so all the buds catch up... and then just when the trees are crawling across the dessert floor thinking they see a mirage... Boom you drop a load of water and everything blooms at once.

The second control is a huge amount of sorting and milling and sorting again by size, density and colour that happens at different stages after picking by machine. It works surprisingly well, but again only for countries with a large amount of capital, expensive labour, and flat land.

I'm a sucker for slow hand picking on goaty slopes myself - the trick is having people like Ben Wilson up there knowing the time spent multi-pass picking his 16 trees and then choosing to pay more for the resulting awesomesauce accordingly haha.

Have fun,
:)

Sweet as Ben!

Sorry Richard, about green tea I do not know much. Other than it is delicious. I did happen to live in northern Japan when I was 17-18 years old, and we used extremely finely ground green tea in the same way that Turkish coffee is prepared. A bit sludgy but good :)

If you are rocking two double shot espressos each day, with 20g pucks, and the coffee is of a high milling factor, 0/20 defect prep, roasted medium, and from an older Arabica variety in great growing conditions... then about 16 trees is you for the year. The math will change a whole heap depending on what you drinking habits are and where the coffee comes from through the chain, but there is one data point for you.

... anyway, that is 81 square meters dedicated to you annually. (4x4 grid under shade with 3m between each tree)

;)

You're right, coffee production is easier when labour is cheap - however coffee is indeed grown in Australia commercially. Around 1980, commercial interest in coffee growing in Australia regenerated due to high world prices and, more importantly, the development of a mechanical harvester in Brazil. That is the way around the expensive labour for flat areas.

Here is a great website about growing coffee in Australia:
http://informedfarmers.com/tag/growing-coffee-in-australia/