As of 2021, we started a new agriculture initiative with coffee farmers in the Mapacho Basin. Their community is located where the mountains meet the jungle. In order to arrive to this particular coffee farming community, community members hike two hours from the main road which makes this community a very remote place. Coffee farmers use mules to help them transport the coffee out of the community.
In the last decade farmers started losing on average 70% of their coffee crop to diseases like Coffee Leaf Rust. Due to the unique mountainous climate the coffee produced here is some of the best in the world yet families continue to live with the bare minimum.
After learning more about their situation, we saw where our agriculture expertise can help support these coffee farmers through improving soil quality and fertility, and offering capacity building of different techniques and brews that can help with pest and plague management, specifically focusing on the Coffee Leaf Rust.
We are focusing on two simple solutions
- Intensive agroecological pests and plague management techniques that will lower the toll of coffee disease allowing farmers to double their production.
- Intensive production and post production training that will help farmers raise their coffee score allowing them to sell their product for a higher price.
We are working with 50 dedicated farmers in four coffee growing communities. The success of this first cohort of producers will be demonstrated to more coffee growing communities and we will leverage the success to scale up the project.