#devocion fresh

Last week we visited a farm in Cundinamarca to cup some Red and Yellow Caturra coffees to be part of our Toro house blend. This farm was teeming with life, both plant and animal, with sugar cane, orange, mandarin, cacao, papaya, yucca, pineapple and a fruit called pitaya growing in abundance all over the farm. This, like many of our other farms, is a farm made up of only a handful of micro lots grown on the steep slopes among wild vegetation.

Above: A view of the tropical vegetation within the valley

Below: Various forms of plant life growing wild among wild coffee trees

The Caturra trees on the farm grow both in plots and wild across the mountainside. Even the planted trees, though, grow to unusual heights of 4 meters or more. Rather than pruning the trees ever year as many other farms do, the coffee is left to grow tall, with farmers having to bend the trees over to reach the cherries near the top.

Above: Our Sustainability Manager Salomon Winograd showing the height of a large Caturra tree that has been on the farm for 10 years

Below: Examples of fully mature Red and Yellow Caturra cherries, ready for harvest

We spent much of the trip with the farmers’ two young sons, playing soccer, teaching them how to use binoculars to spot local and migratory birds, and even finding delicious purple cacao growing wild in the forest. The boys will eventually inherit the farms from their father, just as his father did. In this way, the aggregation of decades of coffee cultivation techniques, along with cutting edge new technological knowledge, is a foundational part of our social sustainability programs within every one of our source farms.

Above: One of the farmers’ sons standing next to his father’s most recent harvests

Below: The two boys and their father as they learn how to use the binoculars to spot birds and other wildlife from Winograd who is a trained ornithologist

The farm has very limited access to technology, so almost everything is done using simple machines, animal labor or by hand. Sacks of coffee must be carried on horseback, six at a time, on a thirty-minute trip down to the highway. Scales are rudimentary and processing equipment is primitive, so the farmer relies on long-held cultivation methods to keep the quality of his coffee at the high level it is.

Above: Farmers weigh sacks of coffee cherries 

Below: A farmer prepares a horse with sacks of coffee to be taken to the highway for transportation to Bogotá

Despite the humble conditions of the farm, our hosts, like all other farms we visit, presented us an offering of some of their crops, killed a chicken and prepared a meal for us. Part of the meal was the incredible cacao that grows wild on the farm, which was fragrant, floral and sweet--certainly one of the most incredible foods we had ever tasted on a farm.

Above: A spread offered as a gift by our hosts

Below: One of the gourds which house the amazing purple cacao beans

Unfortunately for the people of this community and countless others across Colombia, run-ins with guerilla forces have historically been a constant problem and economic detriment. During the height of the civil conflict (which is still occurring at full force elsewhere in the country), guerilla fighters would enter the farm and ask what their affiliation was. Then the Colombian military would enter the farm and do the same, followed by paramilitary groups. The result was a constant interruption of work and fear of bloodshed. Now that there is peace, however, farmers in the community don’t have to worry about armed men and women entering their property at any given time, and they told our team that they hope it stays that way.

Other problems farmers in the community face are climate change and deforestation. Farmers told our team that 30 years ago, there was no need for fertilizer to grow any of the crops they tended. Because of less consistent and more drastic changes in weather, however, fertilizer is now used to regulate the soil. Deforestation has also stripped away some of the vital minerals and chemicals that made the soil so rich and lush, meaning they have to be put back into the earth by hand. 

Above: Flowers from a rose apple tree whose fruit notes actually show up in the Caturras during cupping

Below: A rooster that feeds on decomposing coffee cherries that have fallen from the trees, fertilizing the forest floor and adding nutrition to the soil

3 weeks ago, Devoción’s Bogotá branch held a cupping of coffees cultivated by various micro-lot farmers in the state of Huila, Colombia. We travelled to a very dangerous and conflict-heavy area within Huila, accompanied by a coffee farmer and priest named Father Valenzuela, our main buyer Nelson Vargas and our Sustainability Manager Salomon Winograd.

Above: Cupping one of the 25 farms that participated in the competition.

We invited 50 farmers to the cupping, all of which cultivated farms of 1-3 hectares, half of which did not pass the “humidity test” we give to all coffees on the farm. We do not allow a moisture level of less than 10% or more than 12% inside the sample beans we cup, which is a very strict but necessary standard to eliminate as many variables as possible and get the truest cup of coffee from the bean.

Above: Our Sustainability Manager Salomón Winograd cupping a coffee and filling out information on flavors, aromas, body and other essential components.

After several rounds and two days the winner was announced, a farmer by the name of Rusber Quisaboni who brought a rare Orange Borbon varietal. A week after the cupping, the team traveled to his farm to visit him and present him with his award.

Above: Farmer Rusber Quisaboni in front of the fermentation facility he built on his farm.

Upon arriving to the farm, we saw a series of germination plots. Here, Quisaboni and his family cross breed strands of Borbon, experimenting with germination to further control the flavor notes and aromas that end up in the coffee.

Above: Quisaboni’s germination facility.

Quisaboni’s Orange Borbon cherries are a rarity, but his germination techniques have yielded some incredible results. The orange color of the cherries had to be seen to believed, and many on the team had only heard of the famed varietal. 

Above: Orange Borbon mature and ready for processing

Below: Orange Borbon on the branch in varying degrees of ripeness. Because Colombia grows year-round coffee, mature cherries grow next to young ones, and pickers must therefore pay close attention to only remove the mature cherries from the branches.

As a token of his appreciation, Quisaboni presented us with yucca gourds fresh from his farm. Even though it’s customary for farmers to slaughter a chicken or give an offering of plantains or as in this case yucca, it represents a relatively great sacrifice for very humble farmers who often struggle with the realities of subsistence farming. Devocíon always actively seeks to work directly with the farmers and pay far above fair or direct trade prices. This not only helps us in a business sense to get better results from the farmers who end up investing more into their product, but it also has the dual purpose of bettering their economic and family situation. There are even trickle down benefits of paying farmers more, such as persuading them against illicit farming and using child labor.