A mix of Caturra and Colombia varieties from Luz’s 3 hectare farm Finca La Esperanza in the township of Villa Fátima in Huila 44-year old Luz Dary works on her 3 hectare farm in the township of Villa Fátima, outside of Bruselas, Huila. There are 4,000 caturra trees and 1,000 pink bourbon trees, and she recently renovated 7,000 variedad Colombia trees, replacing the older trees with the “bourbon ají” variety. To process, she starts with ripe cherries, and she floats them in water to remove the under- and over-ripe cherries. From there, she carefully stores the cherries in a sealed Grain Pro bag, and they begin their fermentation process within the cherry.

After 40 hours, she de-pulps the coffee and leaves it to ferment in a sealed barrel for a low-oxygen environment fermentation- up to 60 additional hours of fermentation after the initial cherry ferment. From there, she washes just once and takes the coffee to dry. During peak harvest seasons, she pays a significantly higher price to pickers, which allows her to ask that they only pick ripe cherries. Luz is moving towards organic production, but she’s worried about her yields going down, which could be devastating from an economic perspective. We’ve advised her (like we do to all producers) that we encourage her transition towards organics to be slow, thoughtful and planned out. These days she’s making her own brew (called Super Magro) made up of organic minerals and waste products, molasses, bone ash and manure (among other ingredients), fermented with microorganisms collected from virgin soils and used as a fertilizer and protectant from disease. The Super Magro is edible, effective, and it’s a producer-driven grassroots approach to empower producers to increase soil health, reduce costs, and lessen their dependence on synthetic chemicals. Luz applies the Super Magro to her trees three times a year; she’s also making calcium sulfate and applying it three times a year.

Pricing transparency: We paid 2,800,000 pesos per carga (125 kg of parchment coffee, this is the unit farmers sell their coffee in) to Luz Dary for each of the three lots that make up this coffee. For context, here is a link to the daily carga market price: https://www.federaciondecafeteros.org/static/files/precio_cafe.pdf.