We’ve been using a lot of electrons talking about the volcano this month, so I thought I should throw in a line or two about coffee, since that is what BehindTheCoffee.com was originally all about.

Yet the activity at Kilauea is intimately wedded to what is happening with coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii. There has been so much more rain for those Kona coffee farms at lower elevations since the vent at Halema’uma’u opened, that they are experiencing superabundant flowering on the coffee trees, and have started picking coffee cherry quite early in the season. Farms at higher elevations are also experiencing more rain, but that is not as unusual for them, and they are just now starting the picking season, at a relatively normal time. The rain is washing the potentially harmful elements in the vog off the coffee leaves and into the ground, where it appears the coffee trees enjoy the influx of trace elements.

There are ads in West Hawaii Today ISO coffee pickers. In prior years, these ads have tended to elicit a rather anemic response, because picking coffee is a really hard job, and takes a surprising amount of skill, and people would rather work at Wally Mart. But not this year. The bumper crop is being matched by a corresponding spike in people who are all too happy to pick coffee. What that says about the economy is abundantly obvious.

As far as the volcano goes, activity is down overall, and emissions in the East Rift Zone have dwindled to pre-event levels. But Halema’uma’u is still at 4 to 5 times background values, and the plume is turning brown with ash a couple of times a day. About a dozen earthquakes are located beneath Kilauea Caldera or nearby each 24 hours, but smaller earthquakes are decreasing. No report of significant events.

We’re getting a break in the mornings, with blue skies, or at least a good imitation of them, to greet our rising. It actually feels like a real summer’s day today, which brings a smile to my lips. But later each day, the vog in the air photosynthesizes and we get gray, obviously voggy afternoons and evenings and sometimes nights. I can see the process for the day starting as I write this. The quality of the sunlight is changing, getting noticeably less bright, taking on a yellow tinge. The vog cometh.

I don’t know if it’s just the normal inversion layer around Kona (much like that found in Los Angeles) that is recirculating past emissions, or if the total current emissions of Kilauea are just still enough to trouble us. Whichever, it’s sort of better, and sort of still the same. The effects of the vog on people’s sinuses seems to be pretty much 24/7, although perhaps lighter some of the time. A couple of afternoons ago, it looked like about the second worst vog ever here, just eyeballing it. Clearly… or rather, not so clearly… we are definitely not out of the woods yet.