About This Coffee
The Tocto brothers see Finca Churupampa as a coffee farm and as a social enterprise with a mission to revitalize the economic and social landscape of Chirinos. By helping their farmer members increase their coffee quality, they can increase their farmers’ incomes and improve their quality of life. In addition to selling coffee from their farm, the Toctos provide export and marketing services for 188 neighboring farmers.
Finca Churupampa also operates a training center that is open to the entire community, working with farmers to improve their production practices and break the cycle of poverty that has trapped farmers in the region for many years. The Toctos have also implemented projects to improve food security, from farming vegetables to raising small livestock.
Finca Churupampa also highly values their women producers, encouraging leadership and empowerment through their women’s producer group. These women work in food safety and research around coffee fermentation processes and agronomic technical assistance directed towards the family. In the years since the brothers assumed management of Finca Churupampa, the community of farmers in Chirinos has shifted away from subsistence coffee farming to invest instead in quality and sustainability
Cultivation
Finca Churupampa's coffee is cultivated under shade, with 30% of the coffee trees enjoying partial shade and 70% grown in full shade.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
The training center is also complete with a quality control laboratory to train producers in processing, cupping, technical assistance, and more. Their success lies in community education and investment.
Sustainable Harvest
Sustainable Harvest® is a specialty coffee trader focusing primarily on bringing coffees to market that are sourced from smallholder farmer cooperatives in the supply chain such as indigenous communities, women groups and the next generation of coffee farmers.
Their sourcing model is built on transparency, traceability and direct relationships between quality-minded coffee roasters and best-in-class coffee producers. Sustainable Harvest® has an on-site presence at origin with staff in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Peru. Each office coordinates their supply including quality management, supplier relationships, source development, logistics, training and capacity building.
Coffee in Peru
Peru holds exceptional promise as a producer of high-quality coffees. The country is the largest exporter of organic Arabica coffee globally. With extremely high altitudes and fertile soils, the country’s smallholder farmers also produce some stunning specialty coffees.
Though coffee arrived in Peru in the 1700s, very little coffee was exported until the late 1800s. Until that point, most coffee produced in Peru was consumed locally. When coffee leaf rust hit Indonesia in the late 1800s, a country central to European coffee imports at the time, Europeans began searching elsewhere for their fix. Peru was a perfect option.
Between the late 1800s and the first World War, European interests invested significant resources into coffee production in Peru. However, with the advent of the two World Wars, England and other European powers became weakened and took a less colonialist perspective. When the British and other European land owners left, their land was purchased by the government and redistributed to locals. The Peruvian government repurchased the 2 million hectares previously granted to England and distributed the lands to thousands of local farmers. Many of these farmers later grew coffee on the lands they received.
Today, Peruvian coffee growers are overwhelmingly small scale. Farmers in Peru usually process their coffee on their own farms. Most coffee is Fully washed. Cherry is usually pulped, fermented and dried in the sun on raised beds or drying sheds. Drying greenhouses and parabolic beds are becoming more common as farmers pivot towards specialty markets.
After drying, coffee will then be sold in parchment to the cooperative. Producers who are not members of a cooperative will usually sell to a middleman.
The remoteness of farms combined with their small size means that producers need either middlemen or cooperatives to help get their coffee to market. Cooperative membership protects farmers greatly from exploitation and can make a huge difference to income from coffee. Nonetheless, currently only around 15-25% of smallholder farmers have joined a coop group.