About This Coffee
Floremilda Baca Ramirez farms the 4 hectares of Finca Guaba in Lonya Grande, Utcubamba, Amazonas with careful attention to detail. The farm is organic certified. A member of JUMARP, she’s a part of the Mujeres Program that has been working to improve the livelihoods, autonomy and recognition of female coffee producers. Ramirez receives technical and financial support from the cooperative and has participated in various agricultural and coffee quality improvement workshops through the programme.
Cultivation
Foremilda uses no pesticides or herbicides on her farm, and her production is Organic certified.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
During the harvest season, she selectively harvests the cherry by hand, often with the help of her family. She takes care to harvest only ripe, red cherry, revisiting each tree several times throughout the harvest season. After harvesting, she pulps the cherry using a low-water pulper before dry fermenting the beans for 20-30 hours. She then places the parchment in solar dryers (greenhouses) on raised beds where it will dry for about 15 days. During this time, the parchment is raked regularly to ensure even drying. After the parchment has reached 12% moisture level, it rests for five days on the farm and then another 10 days in the cooperative warehouse before being sold, milled and exported.
About JUMARP
JUMARP was founded by José Carranza Barboza in partnership with 35 other smallholder farmers, in 2003. They created the association out of a desire to develop a new model of growing and exporting coffee.
All 188 members produce coffee certified as organic and Fairtrade. The cooperative invests the premiums received from these certifications in a number of important community projects including crop renovations, a fund for education programs and the construction of schools.
One of their program is the ambitious quality improvement program, which launched in 2012. Funded by Fairtrade and Organic premiums as well as government funding and member contributions, the program aims to raise general overall cup score to 85-86 by 2021. They’ve already taken tangible steps towards this goal and we’ve seen improvement in coffees since the initiation of the program. They built drying houses, manual pulpers and fermentation tanks at all member farms and planted higher quality varietals to address coffee quality at all stages of the production process from seed to cup.
The Mujeres Program
The Mujeres Program, named for the Spanish word for ‘women,’ seeks to improve social and economic standing for women members. JUMARP noticed that women were typically only involved in the cooperative peripherally, especially when it came to decision making. To increase women’s participation, they identified barriers to women’s active participation and then began implementing steps to get women more involved. The Mujeres program helps women develop their knowledge and skills of leadership, self-esteem, decision making, entrepreneur management and teamwork. The participants also receive sensory training and learn to roast in order to help them sell their coffee at a local market.
In fact, the project has been so successful that we’ve been invited to purchase two lots directly from female producers in Mujeres program. These coffees, which are slated to arrive in early December, are an exciting and cutting-edge development from JUMARP.
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.