Adventures In C olombia (continued...)
Try Fairway Fresh Roasted Coffee and Benny explores the land with COSURCA farmers
Like wine, coffee has a terroir: a set of characteristics like geography, weather, geology, and that unnameable something that gives the foodstuffs a character firmly rooted in place. Benny got to taste the personality and terroir of coffee from several of Colombia’s micro-
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Benny and a member of the COSURCA team
regions. He showed off some of our wonderful Fairway coffee from around the world, too. Benny’s next stop was Papallón, the tiny town that is home to Empresa Cooperativa del Sur del Cauca (COSURCA) in Cauca, a beautiful, ruggedly mountainous province in Colombia’s southwest. COSURCA is a cooperative of family coffee farmers founded in 1993 to support coffee growers, and a pretty wonderful organization. It works to provide 1,318 coffee farmers with technical and financial services to renovate their farms, promote organic growing methods, improve their post-harvest coffee
processing, and increase the volume of organic coffee marketed through international Fair Trade channels. In other words, they help small farms succeed. Benny met with some of COSURCA’s farmers, and spent time on their super-small, super-beautiful farms. “It was wonderful to join with the farmers’ knowledge and commitment to coffee,” Benny says. The farmers care about their land, and take enormous pride in what they do. They showed off their rabbits (too cute), and squeezed Benny fresh OJ from the fruit of their fragrant, abundant orange trees.
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farmers pass along and share their experience with the community. There is an open, proud culture—the growers are proud of what they do and want to share that,” Benny says. The farmers often trade labor, spending days on each other’s properties to help pick beans and tend their fields. The growers then bring their coffee beans to Papallón—often travelling on horseback—where the beans’ are separated from the surrounding fruit, sorted, dried, and shipped to Fairway, where Benny oversees their roasting. Working with COSURCA means we know our farmers are getting a fair, living wage. Getting to know our farmers so well means better-quality coffee for YOU— we can choose precisely what we are selling, and make certain the quality is impeccable. -f
COSURCA also helps farmers avoid having to grow and sell coca—the plant from which cocaine is derived. Coca can pull in many times more cash than coffee beans, but it often wreaks havoc on the families who plant it to survive. “Through the co-op,
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