Tadeo Lopez

Now in our third year buying coffee from Tadeo—and our first buying coffee from his son Benjamin—we are as happy as ever with the consistent quality of his output! Tadeo's is an incredibly biodiverse farm, a plethora of fruit trees (avocado, peach and banana, to name a few) are interspersed amongst the coffee shrubs. The soils are high in organic matter and ground cover is kept constant. Fertilization is minimal and applied according to soil analyses. Tadeo and his son Benjamin manage farm operations equally, but not without some family conflicts, as Benjamin wants to implement new practices both in the field (new pruning techniques to increase production) and in processing (paying pickers more to select only ripe cherries for example and cleaner more controlled fermentation and drying regimes). These new practices certainly help to improve cup quality, but they don’t come without a cost- with a competitive job market in the US, lots of local pickers have migrated, which has increased the cost of picking labour.