THE STORY OF A FARM-El Pintado Coffee
25 years ago, when our family moved back to Guatemala, we decided that Antigua would offer a better quality of life for our kids. We moved into an old coffee farm that my grandfather had bought 50 years earlier, hoping it would offer a nice setting free of traffic and surrounded by beautiful volcanoes. We spent the first few weeks fixing up the house, and then turned our attention to the farm which had been producing coffee in a traditional way for decades.
Walking around, I asked the farm manager to show me the mill. The first room he showed me was the “bodega”. I was stunned by all the fertilizer bags which had skulls and bones on the labels. There were fungicides and herbicides and lots of WARNING signs splattered all over the place. I also witnessed the farm workers spraying these products on the plants while dressed in protective clothing more suitable for lab workers in a high security operation.
Seeing all these chemicals, we met with our extended family and decided to go fully organic! We wanted to protect our farm associates from these harmful inputs, and our kids and the environment as well. It was not a financial decision. It was a decision that was aligned with our values of running a farm, and not harming others along the way.
We did the paperwork to become organically certified and after 4 years of soil regeneration, we exported our first container to Whole Foods in the United States. We felt really good about this decision and were surprised at how resilient nature can be when you stop harming it with artificial herbicides, fungicides, and the like. Immediately we started to see more birds, bees and butterflies all over the farm. The sounds in the morning were very loud, and as we got used to these early morning natural alarm clocks, we knew we had made the right decision.
To learn more about El Pintado coffee click here
El Pintado coffee is sold locally at Artista de Cafe on 5th Avenue South #34B Antigua
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