Field Notes: Catalan de las Mercedes, Guatemala

The growth of operations at Catalan De Las Mercedes astounded us this year! Two years of travel restrictions only serve to amplify the feeling of amazement when returning to this farm. Producer Nico Hammond has transformed this third generation farm into an enormous operation, with new additions including a fully staffed school center for harvest workers complete with dormitories and a large scale mechanical drying facility. Among the many efforts toward sustainability, the excess water from the mill is used to irrigate grasslands where livestock graze. They also recycle the cherry pulp into organic compost.

What’s in a Name?

Standing out of the way in the Roman-Lopez family’s courtyard, we watched quietly and learned how locals near Teojomulco, Oaxaca practice delivering and receiving coffee. The Roman-Lopez’s courtyard functions as the local bodega (warehouse) where small scale growers bring their coffee already dried in parchment, which is weighed on arrival and paid for by the Roman-Lopez’s who eventually pool tiny local lots together and handle the next stage of transportation to dry milling.

Field Notes: Sierra Mixteca

We’re pleased to release our lot from the Sierra Mixteca Cooperative this week, despite unforeseen delays in its arrival to the US. This February, 2018, Christina Chin and I had the pleasure of visiting with this group of small producers who were finishing their harvest for the year, which helps us paint a clearer picture of this coffee’s story.

Sierra Mixteca is a mountain range situated in the northern part of Oaxaca, and this coffee comes directly from the community of in the smaller region of Yucihiti. The Mixtec people are one of the dozens of culturally distinct indigenous communities living predominantly in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla states. In the town of Miramar, Yucihiti, the Cooperativo Sierra Mixteca was formed in 2012 to provide local farmers with better leverage in the export market. It also enables them to centralize aspects of processing, transportation, and storage, as well as providing them with extra access to financing.

Made up of 140 members, most of these farmers operate very small farms of .5–3 hectares, where the vast majority of labor is performed by the farming families with little to no additional workers. They are committed to Organic farming. We visited with two such families who we’re profiling here.

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