On Colombia

General

Colombia is subdivided into 32 departments, each with its own capital, and one capital district, Bogotá. The terrain consists of flat coastal lowlands, central highlands, high Andes Mountains and eastern lowland plains. The highest point of the country is Pico Cristobal Colón at 5,775m. Because of the high number of active volcanoes, the highlands are often threatened by volcanic eruptions. Colombian climate is tropical along the coast and eastern plains, whereas the highlands are much cooler.

Purely seen from a coffee perspective, Colombia is a hugely diverse and fascinating country with a lot of potential. The country’s coffee growing regions are delimited between the North altitude 1° to 11°15, Longitude West 72° to 78° and can surpass 2.000 meters above sea level. The growing regions have a specific climate and rain pattern, generated by the double path of the Intertropical Convergence Zone over the coffee area. Because of that, the coffee benefits from an adequate amount and distribution of rain.

The Colombian Coffee Story

As the story goes, coffee was brought to South America by Jesuits, around 1730. The earliest testimony of coffee in Colombia dates back to 1730, in a book written by a Jesuit priest called José Gumilla. Coffee crops pioneered in the eastern part of the country, and by 1835 the first commercial production of coffee was registered and exported. Later on, coffee became established in the northeast of the country, in the departments of Santander, North Santander, Cundinamarca, Antioquia and Caldas. However, it was only in the second half of the 19th century that coffee was consolidated as an export product.  

The fall of international prices at the transition of the 19th to the 20th century changed the face of Colombia’s coffee sector. A lot of the large estates were ruined. Small-scale coffee cultivation, however, flourished, especially in the west. The numbers of small or local farms grew, and at the start of the 20th century the development of the coffee industry was led by small producers in the western regions of the country, mostly Antioquia, Caldas, Valle and part of Tolima.  

Nowadays, coffee is one of the most important agricultural products in the country. In 2010, total production was at 8.9 million 70kg bags, of which 7.8 million were exported.

Organization

The flagship of Colombian coffee production is the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (National Federation of Coffee Growers), assisted by the Colombian government. In 1927 the FNC, a non-profit business association, was created to defend the interests of all the small-scale and local farmers and to promote the production and exportation of Colombian coffee. Currently, it represents over 500,000 producers. The federation also created the research body Cenicafe, which is responsible for developing new cultivation programs, and the agricultural Servicio de Extensión for technical, social, economic, environmental and seed programs. Thanks to these programs, cultivating coffee has become a bit easier for the Colombian grower, but it also entails that there has been little variation in the coffees available due to a lack of individual experimentation with varieties, different processing techniques and so on, which would make the coffee interesting from a specialty coffee viewpoint as well.

The FNC is also responsible for the strong marketing campaign that has brought Colombian coffee to international attention. During the late 1950s, the price of Colombian coffee plummeted from US $0.85 to 0.45 per pound due to an excessive supply in the world market. Roasters would blend coffee beans from various unspecified origins to get a flexibility that would maximize their profit margins. As a result, public awareness of the origin of coffees was low. Only 4 percent of consumers in the United States, the largest coffee market at the time, were aware that Colombia produced coffee. The FNC felt this had to change, so they embarked on a mission to make consumers aware where coffee comes from. Colombia became the first coffee-producing country to adopt an active strategy of differentiating and marketing its product. They created the fictional image of Juan Valdéz, the symbol for Colombian coffee growers, which is recognized in countries far outside Colombia. In 2007, Colombian coffee was granted Protected Designation of Origin status by the European Union. Outside of Europe, the Denomination of Origin label identifies your coffee as purely Colombian. The coffee is also sold under two trademarks, “100% Colombian Coffee” and “Café de Colombia”.  

At a regional level, coffee growers are represented by Departmental Committees of Coffee growers, located in the capitals of the coffee growing departments of Antioquia, Boyacá, Caldas, Cauca, Cesar-Guajira, Cundinamarca, Huila, Magdalena, Nariño, Norte de Santander, Quindío, Risaralda, Santander, Tolima and Valle del Cauca. The Departmental Committees are responsible for orienting the Federation and executing its different programs through the assistance of the Municipal Committees of Coffee Growers. In order to comply with these objectives, the Departmental Committees count on the Municipal Committees of Coffee Growers, which are responsible for the organization and representation of coffee growers at the municipal level, as well as acting as the voice of these communities in front of the Departmental Committees.

Alongside the dominant institutional structure of the FNC, coffee is also produced by smaller private growers and mills. According to a recent count, Colombia has 38 cooperatives that work independently from the Federation. Coffees produced by these cooperatives or private farmers can in most cases be traced back to their specific farms or cooperatives and their label details more information than only a grade. Where the FNC mostly uses mixtures of varieties, among which disease-resistant hybrids like Castillo, these private operations often use the more traditional varieties, like Bourbon and Typica. The number of these smaller incentives has recently been seeing a steady increase.

Growing Conditions

Colombian coffee is cultivated along the three different mountain ranges of the Andes as well as in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, from the Atlantic coast in the North to the border between Colombia and Ecuador in the South. The coffee cultivation land occupies about 850,000 to 900,000 hectares. Other areas in which coffee can be produced are dedicated to the maintenance of the natural forests and other agricultural activities.  

Because of their altitude, the coffee growing regions benefit from a stable median temperature between 18° to 24° C. The lack of contrasts in temperature during the day and the temperature throughout the year also favors the generation of sugars and other compounds within the coffee beans.

Average annual rainfall is close to 2.000 millimeters. The central coffee growing regions in the country present dry and rainy periods in different months, which allow harvesting fresh coffee regularly during the whole year. In most of the coffee growing regions in the country the flowering period runs from January to March, with another flowering from July to September. The main harvest in these zones takes place between September and December, with a secondary harvest, or mitaca, during the second quarter of the year. The main harvest and the mitaca could be alternated in other regions, in accordance with their latitude.

The soil where coffee is grown in Colombia varies from sandy to rocky and even clay-like, in slopes that vary from flat to slightly undulated to steep and dramatic, with marked differences in the origin of the soil. Colombia has different coffee regions throughout the three mountain ranges: the Eastern, Central, and Western regions. Soils of igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary and volcanic origin are found there. The main characteristic of the soils is their volcanic origin, with a rich content of organic material, which reduces the need for fertilizer.

Because of the country’s vastness and marked differences in topography, Colombia has a lot of microclimates. The different ecosystems determine the decisions of producers on the level of technification of their cultivation and the coffee varieties to be used. Coffee plantations are developed under different systems of cultivation, which include traditional plantations with lower productivity on the one hand, and those more advanced and technical, with sun exposure, partially-shaded or those considered shade grown, on the other hand. In any of these systems of cultivation, only coffee of the Arabica species are cultivated, using varieties that adapted to their specific conditions of production, like Typica, Bourbon, Caturra, Castillo or Tabi.

Most coffee growers live on small farms whose coffee cultivation plots do not surpass 2 hectares on average. Only a small part of Colombian coffee producers have coffee plantations of a size bigger than 5 hectares. Given the structure of the properties and the average size of the farms, in most occasions the work of harvesting and post-harvesting is carried out by the producers themselves.

Coffee Production

There are more than 563,000 families producing coffee in the country, in 588 municipalities of 20 departments, from the provinces that limit with Ecuador, in the South, up to those that border the Caribbean Sea in the North. Along nearly 3,000 kilometers of inter-Andean valleys, from the extreme South to the extreme North of Colombia, the producers live in coffee growing regions that are totally different from one to another, due to the vastness of the territory and its numerous microclimates. In general, it could be said that Colombia's coffee regions are characterized by the differences between their rain patterns and their harvest cycles, and the altitude and temperature at which their coffee is produced. In the southern zones of the country, close to the Equator, coffee is produced at a higher altitude and at temperatures that are less elevated. The coffees produced in specific regions such as Nariño, Cauca, Huila or South of Tolima have different harvest cycles. They have a higher acidity and other certain special attributes, on occasions very specific in terms of aroma, or sweetness, very demanded by sophisticated markets

Coffee-Growing Axis (Café Ejetero)  

Most of the Colombian coffee is grown in the so-called Coffee-Growing Axis, or Eje Cafetero in Spanish. The axis is an area in the country’s rural Paisa region, consisting of departments Caldas, Quindío and Risaralda. The department of Caldas is, on its own, responsible for 10.33% of the national green bean production. This might be, among other factors, explained by the high rate of mechanization (95.2% of the 81,919 hectares) in the area, as opposed to only 4.8% with traditional cultivation methods.  

Of course, not all Colombian coffee is produced in the coffee growing axis. Huila, Cauca, Nariño, Antioquia, Santander and Cundinamarca are also known for their great coffee.