Hello, everyone. Happy September. per today's episode, I have a special guest for you. I know Louisa from Mayo in Brazil for Zenda. The meal. I wanted to have her on the podcast because she has a really generous spirit and believes in sharing and spreading information. If you're in the coffee industry, you can't ignore the influence of a country like Brazil. But even a coffee professional, like me was largely ignorant of the information that I learned from Ana about Brazil.
I hope today's conversation gives you more context about our industry and helps inspire new ideas as to how we can learn from Mia's example. And how we can apply it to our own situations. With this podcast, I hope to give a broader context and examples of modern coffee producers. And I definitely think that Ana encompasses this spirit and this idea of embracing technology embracing the future and kind of weaving it all together to make something new and very exciting. But before we meet Ana.
I do want to mention that while FTC Kenya is sold out, coming in October. There are still tickets available for FTC Guatemala in December, and then also in January. December's workshop will be completely in Spanish. So if you're bilingual, I would love to have you. And if your Spanish isn't strong enough yet, then the January workshop will be completely in English. And if you're new here and you're not familiar with FTC. It stands for fermentation training camp.
And it's a week long workshop where you come to a coffee farm and learn about microbiology and drying and just general good practices for processing coffee with me. Uh, as well as a group of coffee, producers and other coffee professionals. So the exact date and prices for all of that are on my website. At lucia.coffee, L U X I a dot C O F F E. And you can also find a link for that in the show notes.
And if you're listening to this the week, it comes out, you're still in time for our live office hours, Friday, September 6th at 9:00 AM. Guatemala time. This is an opportunity for me to hop on discord and chat with all of you. It's always great fun. We love getting harvest updates from around the world and seeing old friends. So if you've been thinking about joining us, now's the time. hi Anna. How are you?
Hi Lucia, I'm well, thank you. How are you?
I'm doing great. I'm really glad we could finally connect we've been planning this episode this conversation for a little while and we've had some delays on both of our sides So i'm really glad that we're finally making time for you to be on making coffee
Absolutely. I'm really happy to really glad we could get this done
So before I let Anna talk, I'm going to introduce the audience to who this wonderful woman is. And I virtually met Anna when I saw her presentation on Coffee Knowledge Hub about precision agriculture and how her farm uses AI technology to take better advantage of resources.
And I learned so much during that presentation, which I'll also leave in the show notes a link if you guys want to watch, because there's some really great visuals that she includes of her farm and some of the equipment, so you can see that in the show notes if you want to watch the whole presentation, but I wanted to invite her on making coffee so that she can share some of these, some of the, what her farm is doing in Brazil to our wider audience. And Ana is the co owner at Mio.
Mio is a coffee farm in Monte Santo de Minas, Brazil. And Mio exports, imports, stores, and sells coffee. So this is who she is. And once again, Ana, welcome.
Thank you so much Lucia. Yeah, thank you for the invitation and I've been following your podcast for quite some time Now and I'm really happy to be a part of it. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me
No, I really appreciate that. And I think, you know, it's one of the things that I strive for is Sharing an education and there's a lot of things that we don't know about. And so that's something that really struck me in your presentation is I didn't realize that precision agriculture was being used in coffee. And obviously it's still, you know, quite a new frontier.
So before we get into defining what precision agriculture is, can you give us more of a background on your farm, like your location, size, the varieties that you have, and also how, Is it compared to your neighbors? Is there any differences between your farm and your, neighbors traditional farming?
Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, our farm is located in Monsanto de Minas, which is a tiny town in Brazil, and it is in the southwestern region of Minas Gerais, which is one of the biggest coffee producing states in Brazil. And the farm has about 1, 500 hectares, which is a medium size for Brazilian standards. From this hectares are devoted to coffee production. 400 hectares are devoted to maintaining our native forest reserves. And the rest of the space is a mix of different things.
So we have eucalyptus, beehives, we have soy and corn, which we use for crop rotation with the coffee, some houses, a small chapel, and then we have the wet mill and the dry mill structures for the coffee processing. So we try to maintain an equal balance between forest and coffee. And if we ever plant more coffee areas, we also must do a reforestation work in a different area you So just to maintain that balance of having the equal, equal space for coffee and for forest.
And I would say we are very different from some of our neighbors, but they, they do some great work as well. And there are a lot of areas of expertise that we try to learn from them too. So it's quite a small town. So most people know each other, you know, my parents went to school with some of them. So we try to be good neighbors.
And we also try to be, at the front of innovation and technology and sustainability and try to really push the bar on quality in terms of the product we offer, but also in terms of, having a better life conditions for everyone involved at the farm and so on. For example, we were starting a research institute at the farm. It's going to be called Mia Institute, and we will aim to research coffee worldwide from inside the farm.
So we're really excited to start this project over the next couple of months and will be the first on this style in our region as well. So it's really exciting. It's quite a cool moment.
Yeah, we're going to be talking a little bit more about some of the research that you're doing and the professional scientists that you're working with in different areas of, of production. But I first wanted to ask you, you mentioned that You try to keep a balance between coffee and native forest. Is that something that is just your own personal initiative or is there some kind of government support or, is that something that other producers in Brazil are doing or are you completely unique? And
So Brazil has a lot of specific laws for forest and native biomes in general. And it's depending on which region of Brazil you're at, there's a different percentage of native biome that you have to have on your farm.
And to be able to to say that you are within the law and what the what Brazil asks for the closest you are to the Amazon, the more you need areas that are dedicated to the biome so it can go all the way up to, I think, 70 percent of your area dedicated to native biomes and the region we are at. They ask for a minimum of 20 percent of your total farm area to be dedicated to a native biome. for us, we have more than that. We go to up to 30 percent of our area dedicated to native forest.
And if we plant more coffee, we would reforestate more areas. So we could go. even higher than 30%. so for us, it's more about, yeah, just, just making sure we're not using more area for, for coffee than we are for maintaining the biome that we We are located at, we put as much, you know, as much focus on, on both things. And it's all about maintaining that economical sustainability and the environmental sustainability at the same time.
So yeah, if we, if we're producing coffee, we should be keeping the forest alive as well.
you say that, you know, you have a pretty good relationship with your neighbors. And since you have your own wet mill and dry mill, do you only Do you process what you produce on your family's farm or do you also buy some cherry or coffee from neighbors?
We don't process other, other people's coffee in our property at the moment. It is a plan that we might look at in the future, but at the moment it just makes sense to do our own production because of the size of the production we already have. and the timeframe for harvest is just, yeah, it's more of a future plan. And in our region, there are a lot of people that will have their own wet meals and then the people that don't have it, they normally produce naturals as their main focus.
So yeah, it would be a possibility, in the future, but at the moment we are, we're focusing on our own lands.
We're going to talk about size a little bit later, but how common is it for producers to have their own dry milk? Cause I'll just share that in Guatemala, it's not very common in Columbia, like the countries where I have the most experience and where I've lived, it's, it's unheard of. To be the size, most that process their own coffee, but not dry millet.
So it's not very common in our region. I think in Brazil it depends on the area you are located. You might have more or less. in our case, our region, it's very old in coffee. So we, we tend to have more dry meals at farms. But for us, for us, for example, we have, first steps of dry milling at the farm, and then the rest of the dry mill, it's done at the warehouse. So we don't go all the way to, you know, getting containers ready for export.
We go, to a certain stage, and then the last three steps are done at the warehouse. so yeah, it's not common to have dry mills, Inside farms, definitely.
So something that I thought was really interesting is that you are a third generation family farm, and that's not very traditional that you. You weren't brought up to always, take over and join the family farm. It's something that you've gotten into after having a different career. And I just think it's rare to see younger people in coffee getting into the coffee farming business. So I just wanted to get a background into, you know, coffee. How was that growing up?
Like, did your father always want you to be part of it? Did you feel that there was that kind of push from them or how did you find yourself coming into the business?
Well I think even after four years that I've been doing this we're still shocked that I joined my father in the team. I used to work in art and in managing contemporary art exhibitions in Latin America. So for most of my life, I wanted nothing to do with the farm and I really couldn't see You know, how being a farmer could be fitting with what I wanted for my life personally.
A lot of me just wanted to be a cool girl living in you know, in a flat, in a big city like Sao Paulo and working in art and having, you know, a great job and stuff. And when I actually went for it and I got to do pretty much out of that in my twenties, I was lucky enough to, to go into the art world and and working that for quite a while, but things changed when I moved to London with my partner, and I was looking for a job in the UK.
And my father suggested that we should research the UK coffee scene to start thinking about potentially exporting our coffee. And I said yes to that kind of brief job, because basically I needed to support myself in a new town. And Yeah, magic just happened from there. I fell in love with coffee. I realized I really liked the people that worked in coffee here in the UK. And I also realized that there was no one in the UK doing what we could do as a farm with me living in London.
So it was quite a special situation. I could represent the farm as co owner and we could open a UK branch for importing and selling our own coffee. So besides that I'm also married to a designer and he really got involved in that and was up to just leaving everything and started working as the designer for the farm and for Mior. So yeah, when COVID came along, we, we were kind of ready. It wasn't the plan to start during COVID, but you know, there wasn't much of an option.
So yeah, Mior opened in September, 2020 in the UK and our first container arrived that same year. But yeah, my father never pushed us to work in agriculture or coffee, not me or my sisters. But you know, I have to say he was quite happy when it happened and it was really good for our relationship and it's, it's quite cool to work with him and my mom and my husband. You know, it's a family business and yeah, it's, it's awesome and we have a really good team with us as well.
So yeah, definitely happy I got there.
It's interesting. I didn't realize we had some of that background in common because I also am married to a graphic designer. Maybe people don't know that Nick's previous career was a graphic designer. And when we met in Ohio, he had his own clients and for COVID I was stuck. Not able to travel, not able to do my consulting. And so finally, when a few countries started to open up at the end of 2020, I asked if he wanted to come with me and just join me.
And so at that point he still had a couple of his private clients. And. He's like, no, coffee's way more interesting. And so I kind of recruited him to work with me. And so now he's my partner and everything that we do. And he's, it's so nice to have somebody trained in art trained in that specific way of thinking. So I'm really curious how someone with a role in art, like you got into coffee, like you said, you didn't really want to, it was not on your radar for a really long time.
And how you feel that you're training in art. What do you bring about your previous art training into coffee?
Okay. So I think first it's really interesting to know that about your husband as well. And it's, it's quite cool to have someone involved in design within the company and being a small company, that's quite rare. You normally just. for you know, doing the basic work for a while and it makes so much difference to the work you do in general. So yeah, it's pretty cool. And for me, well, my situation I think is quite specific because the farm was always there.
You know, coffee was always a big part of my life, but for me, it was just my father's work, my family's inheritance. And it sounded quite difficult at the time as a young woman to imagine myself caring for the farm. Because agriculture in Brazil is still a very masculine, difficult environment. And yeah, as a young girl, I didn't see myself as someone that could belong in that environment. I didn't feel very welcome, even though, you know, my father's pretty cool. He's very, he's a feminist.
He's very open minded and just really awesome in that sense. But I knew the industry wouldn't be out like that. You know, I'm, I'm very left wing. I'm all tattooed up. And yeah, I just, you know, Art seemed like a better place for me at the time, and I was very happy working with that for quite a while. You know, I was bringing contemporary artists to Brazil and Latin America, and I was managing their exhibitions, and there was a lot of traveling, touring with them.
And the level of stress was pretty intense, intense, and I wasn't, although I was happy, I was very tired and stressed. So yeah, people weren't as nice as I expected. When you think art, you think, you know, cool people, artists, and as a young person, you think that's going to be awesome. And then you actually meet a lot of horrible people. And that was kind of a wake up call for me back then that, you know, there's good and bad people everywhere.
Everywhere in our industries doesn't matter what job you have. So yeah, I ended up founding my crew in coffee when I met roasters and baristas, you know, people who look like me, who spoke like me and got excited about the same things that I did. And I sort of used those friendships to learn everything I could about coffee and feel more confident. And then I started working very closely with Christiane Gervasi. She's nowadays our.
CFO, she works in our, the finance side of the business, but she used to take care of everything at the farm and she taught me a lot about coffee and about farming and about being a woman in a leading team at a farm. And yeah, nowadays I feel very at home at the farm as the commercial director and corner. And I know that. The team we have are awesome and they're very inclusive people. They're all different from each other and complimentary of each other.
So yeah, it turns out that, yeah, the people at the farm are much nicer than most artists were. So I'm pretty happy I chose to change to change what I used to do. Yeah.
I will also say that it's, you know, not super helpful to generalize, but I have also found in my experience that coffee people are pretty great being able to not just like start this community, but just when you meet people at trade shows or, any kind of experience that I happen to have either listeners of the podcast, I feel like I have friends in all over the world and it's just I think we are.
We're not unique, but it just feels like a little bit more amped up that the coffee industry attracts some very, you know, interesting people with very diverse backgrounds. And so like always gives us a lot to chat about. And I was admiring your tattoos because we've only ever met virtually and I couldn't see them on your previous presentation, but I was looking at your, your hands and can I see the one on your hand?
Yeah, which one? A
That one. Yeah, very cool. Do you have one artist that you go to that you've been loyal to?
No, I try to, I try to change, but my first one was with a very cool artist from Sao Paulo. Her name is Louisa and she's just, yeah, she's, she's a very special artist. So, yeah, I try to change quite a lot, but yeah, I like to do works that are you know, alteral and yeah, their, their own creations.
That's interesting. I have a different approach I when I started getting tattoos I was in college and there was a woman who Kai smart who did all of my tattoos and I wouldn't go to anybody else And then I obviously graduated from college and I would still go back to see her And then she Went to a new city, and then I would still go back to see her because I would get one every year for my birthday. So I kept that relationship with her for years.
And then finally I moved far enough away, I couldn't keep going to see her. So then I found a new artist in San Diego. And I've been with him for like, six years. I've been with him longer than my husband. I have, that's like a relationship that has been really. And when before we started traveling, Nick wanted to get his first tattoo. And so I took him to my guy, took him to Ryan in San Diego. So I don't like to like mess around. I really am like very loyal to my tattoo artists.
That's completely completely different. Yeah, proposition. I like that.
but tell me, so you were this cool girl living this awesome artist life in Sao Paulo. How did you end up in London?
Well, I'm not sure how cool it was, but I tried. So, yeah, my father always had to have a second job. He inherited the farm from my grandparents, and he maintained most of his life as a side business. We used to go every other weekend, but we didn't leave there. You know, my father worked in multinationals and the money that he would work, he would earn from that, he would put back at the farm and he was buying land and investing at the farm in general.
So it was actually my father's job in a multinational that brought me and my whole family to London in 2018. He got promoted to a global position. And yeah, we all decided to come. And he and my mom lived here in London from 2018 until earlier this year. And then my father retired from this position he had. And yeah, he, they, they moved back to the farm pretty much. And my dad kind of got the reins back and it's kind of driving the farm again. So it's quite an interesting story.
But yeah, I'm, I'm the first generation to be able to. leave out of the farm alone and not have other jobs. So it's pretty cool. And yeah, nowadays one of my sisters are living in the US and then myself, my partner, and my other sister, my middle sister, we, we remained in the UK and we feel very, very much at home here.
That's really interesting. I. I have been to, well, now I've been to London. Unfortunately we weren't able to catch up, but I've also been to Brazil twice for consulting visits in, in Sao Paulo. I had an amazing trip, great time and something that was so surprising to me, which everyone talks about Brazil. Brazil is big, Brazil is huge, but it's not until you get there and I was in the car just driving these long distances. That I really got a sense of how big Brazil is.
So can you give us an idea of the size perspective? Cause it's, it can be so abstract for so many people.
Yeah, absolutely. It's quite shocking, I think. And for me, it was the opposite of what you just said. You know, I lived in Brazil my whole life, and it was only when I moved to the UK that I started realizing how far away things are in Brazil because I finally was living in a smaller place and I could compare. So yeah, as as a base for comparison, Brazil is actually twice the size of the European Union plus the UK. So That means that it's twice the size of more than 25 countries.
It's almost saying Brazil is the size of 50 European sized countries. And that's quite shocking. And by realizing that, I think we can put a lot of things in perspective in the coffee world even, because, you know, Brazil is considered to be one origin for coffee, right? But in the context of, Coffee, when you say origin, you think of one specific place and we produce coffee in the majority of the regions in Brazil.
So it's like saying that, you know, tomatoes produced in Italy are the same tomatoes produced in Norway. I don't know if Norway produces tomatoes, but you get what I mean. It's just how can you say those two are the same origin of tomatoes? You know, it will be different. And yeah, it's just good for us to stop and think that within the same origin, there is an infinity of origins available.
And yeah, The country itself has five different regions or states and within it we have six completely different biomes. You know, people tend to think about the Amazon when they think about Brazil, but we have other five biomes within the country. And Brazil, I think a lot of people know that, but Brazil is also the world's largest coffee producer. And it has been so for more than 150 years. And nowadays it represents 30 percent of the global coffee production.
So yeah, coffee in Brazil produces about 8 million jobs. And there are 330, 000 properties in Brazil producing coffee. And those go from small farms with less than 5 hectares all the way up to gigantic farms that can reach up to 5, 500 hectares of planted coffee, which is about 7, 000 tons of coffee per year. It's more than the entire output of Panama or Bolivia for coffee, for example.
Yeah. I really like that point that you, That you help us think about is that we think we're being specific when we say the origin of Brazil, but it's really vague and meaningless because it, it doesn't drill down into what we want to know. And you're saying there's so many different regions with different biomes, which means we have different climates and microclimates and influences. And of course, it's all going to impact our coffee flavor.
And yet I think too many people still have Brazil as like one type of coffee or one kind of flavor profile. So I love that you're kind of opening up. That perspective for us but I also want to clarify the last thing that you said, are you saying that a single giant farm in Brazil, one single giant farm can exceed the production of an entire other producing country?
Yeah, so yeah, the biggest farm in Brazil produces pretty much the same as Panama or Bolivia does. It's quite shocking. And yeah. The, the, the word origin for defining where coffee comes from is, I think, a pretty big topic for me, just because it, it doesn't say a lot and it tends to put a lot of different people and a lot of different products into one big box that just doesn't make a lot of sense.
I agree. Do you think that there's a better word that we could be using? Is it, is that something that needs to be completely done away with or is there something more appropriate? I've, I don't like to use the word origin also because of, you know, coffee's kind of widespread. Colonial influence. I like to use like producing country. I like to say this is a place where coffee is produced. But I don't even know if that hits like the heart of it.
I was just wondering because it's not such a great word. If you have any thoughts on that.
Yeah, I tend to try and use coffee producing countries as well, because that's just a definition, right? We're using tomatoes, again, randomly, but yeah, Italy is a country that produces tomatoes, so it is a tomato producing country. You know, that doesn't say a lot about the country or the product. It's just a fact. You know, Brazil is a coffee producing country, and that's a fact.
It doesn't mean that our coffee coming from there will be the same, or it doesn't mean that our people producing coffee there will be doing the same protocols or the same farming or anything, really. So I think it's just a definition of where coffee comes from. And there will be more than 70 countries that will be. coffee producing countries. But yeah, I think the word origin as like origin trip or anything like that is just, it's, yeah, for me it sounds very colonial. I'm not going to lie.
Yeah. And, and, you know, it's very outdated too, because the other part, you know, we talk a lot on this podcast about being precise and. The importance of language and I can't help but feel that origin has a lot of baggage with it. Not just the colonial baggage, but just the idea of that romantic notion. When it's not necessarily, well, it's not needed anymore. We, like you said, we can just replace it with factual things like a coffee producing country.
Yeah, absolutely, or a trip to Brazil to visit a supplier, you know, it doesn't have to be. Yeah, I know people don't mean bad things, it's just, yeah, I think it's important, like you said, to pay attention to the words we use, especially when there's so much, so many, so much baggage and so much things involved.
So another thing that's interesting to me about Brazil is the big difference in growing, I actually use this in one of my, I use a picture of a Brazilian, full sun farm as part of my presentation for our fermentation camps, because people that are not familiar with that type of full sun growing system it looks very different from where I live in Guatemala and, you know, where a lot of Central American coffee farms that are more of a shade system.
So what can you tell us about the full sun system in Brazil?
So Brazil is nowadays it has 90 percent of its coffee production under full sun system. So I think this has good and bad things associated with it. There are a few reasons for this decision over the years.
Brazilian farms have been told to focus on the volume of production, Per plant since forever, you know, I mentioned Brazil has been the biggest coffee producer for more than 150 years So you can see how far that history comes and the general belief With traditional agronomical management in brazil is that shade reduces yielding and yield is the most important thing so, Then the second point is mechanization, you know in order to be able to mechanize an area We need to design the coffee fields to
facilitate machine work You And then the third reason is that to try and the cost of production. So if you have more plants per hectare, it is cheaper to maintain. And you will also need less human manual labor. The last reason for fulsome systems in Brazil is how fast we need to move. If you think of those medium and large properties in Brazil, there are just too many hectares to harvest in a very narrow time frame.
So if you don't use machines, it's humanly impossible to harvest everything in three, four months. You just can't do it. So I think those would be like the main reasons behind the full sun system in Brazil and how it was kind of put in place.
You know, there's such an emphasis on handpicked in specialty coffee. And I really think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier, the artisanal side, the romantic side, the craft of coffee. But just like you're telling us, it's not only that it's not realistic for the scale that you're at, but more and more in Central America where I work, where I'm more familiar, labor is literally disappearing. So even if we, you know, Had enough, and it could be humanly possible.
The people just don't exist. The bodies are not there. So I, I think it's a reality that we have to face. And in addition to it, you know, it's just going to have to be the future where we have more mechanized options. The other kind of complaint or the other kind of pushback that I get is this idea that the coffee that comes out of mechanical harvesters isn't as good as hand picked. It's a kind of quality conversation. But I've personally been to Brazil.
I've seen the mechanical harvesters working and I have been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the red ripe cherries that is coming out of these machine harvesting. So I didn't see that the trees were getting beat up. I didn't see that the quality was lower. But could you speak a little bit more to kind of your experience about how that works?
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as I, as I mentioned, Brazil has long been investing in technology with focusing increasing productivity, but once technology is already in place, it can be used to achieve diversified aims, right? including exceptional quality. It's just a matter of choosing how you're going to use it, talking about the technology that is available. And Brazil has focused more and more on that exceptional quality during the last 20 years.
And I think the green coffee buyer and consequently the final consumer are still assuming that Brazil's emphasis on technological agriculture and high productivity. is equal to poor quality coffee, right? That's registered in their brains. And I think this belief has been built on misconceptions about what really impacts quality. So one common misconception is that only handpicked coffee can deliver a beverage of exceptional quality.
Like you were saying, you know, mechanization is for volume and the quasi artisanal methods are for quality, but the harvest method alone. Does not hold such a power in determining quality. Actually, scientific evidence has shown us that crop management and post harvest processing are the two major determinants of quality, not harvest.
Yeah. It's kind of silly when you think about it that way, you know, you have to spend the whole season, the whole nine months growing coffee. So what you do before that moment, and then after it's picked. Well, everything that we do in the wet mill and dry mill and storage are so much more important for quality than how we actually get the cherry off of the tree.
So, you know, when you think about it in that long chain, the method of detachment is, is rather a small part in terms of quality, and yet it's Kind of like the thing that we most visually attach to.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Usually, you know, the, the harvest method is, is not even chose thinking of quality necessarily only, you know, it, the harvest method is chosen based on the, topography of the terrain you're at, and it's very common to see both methods being used in the same farm. And, you know, if harvesters are to be used, they can simply, they can simply have their vibration rate adjusted to optimize the picking of ripe cherries.
So the technology is up there, you know, and in any case, our coffee cherries picked by hand or by machine will then go through batch separation in the wet mill according to certain maturation criteria. So, you know, weight, bricks, value, all of that. And at this point, different batches or lots are created.
And some of those lots, after proper drying and sorting, We'll deliver a high quality beans, so the same farm can produce exceptional micro lots in smaller quantities and at the same time deliver larger volumes of coffee of different ratings, both high quality and lower quality. And what is important in this is the technology.
Allows full traceability off the environmental impact, you know, the human labor impact full understanding off detailed costs off production and the entire history really off management regarding that specific coffee plot. And. It's essential, I think, that the coffee industry understands that crop mechanization as part of technology is neither destroying coffee quality nor the planet nor the coffee plants.
I think another misconception here is that mechanization is stealing jobs, you know, like you said you know, working as a field worker at a coffee farm is really hard work. It's hot. It's under the sun all the time. It's very physical and tiring and it's harder and harder every year to find workers for the men who will work on a farm. And I can't really Blame the workers at all. It doesn't matter.
You know how much you invest as a farm owner in giving them better life conditions and better work conditions. Most work out there is better than manual labor at a coffee farm. It's just a fact. You know, we have seen people changing from coffee to tomatoes in our region, for example. In a sense, it just makes me happy that people don't want to work as manual labor in coffee anymore. It just means that they are finding better jobs in, you know, elsewhere.
And yeah, it makes life as a coffee producer much harder, but you know, good on them. I'm happy for them.
Yeah, I really want to emphasize this point for a minute. Cause when I was living in Risaralda in Columbia, most of the work, most of the harvesting work there was done by indigenous communities. And I had some conversations with coffee growers who were upset at the lack of labor. They were really frustrated that, you know, they would need to harvest and half the people would show up or nobody would show up.
Because the indigenous communities were finally getting some government subsidies for, you know, stealing their land and basically being difficult for them. And so they were getting, they were having access to some subsidies and therefore they needed to work less. So they weren't showing up to pick coffee. And like you said, you understand the frustration. But I too was really glad that.
People weren't so desperate that there was another option because like you mentioned this job is really hard under the Sun But it's funny where I was in Columbia. It's how the coffee was harvested during the rainy season So people would be drenched because they would still have to go pick coffee and it's really steep.
So it's slippery There's snakes, there's all kinds of Challenges, it's a really difficult place to work So the fact that people aren't so desperate that they have that they have to do that is overall a positive thing You Another example here in Guatemala is that the biggest export and contributor to the GDP is not coffee, but actually people. So Guatemalans go to the US and then they earn in dollars and then they send it back to their family. It's called the remesa.
And this makes up about 15 percent of the country's economy. It's really important for, for the economy. Guatemalans to go make dollars and, and send them back. So a worker can go to the U S and make enough money to support their family. And now those women and children don't have to be working in the field. And again, like it's, it's a really frustrating cause you're like, Oh, there's nobody there's the coffee's rotting on the trees, but also we've created this really unpleasant.
Situation that unpleasant decision for people to say Am I so desperate that I'm going to do that? Or now we have this other option. So like you said, I think that while it's frustrating, it's overall a positive thing. And as a coffee sector, we're going to have to come up with solutions for. This lack of, of labor
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, we, we mentioned Environmental sustainability, economical sustainability, and this is social sustainability. You know, it's finding jobs that are not as horrible for people to work in and and start not depending on on people to do that sort of jobs anymore. And, you know, if you work as a truck driver at a farm or a harvester driver at a farm, you know, life can be much better than as a manual harvest.
And you have, you know, you can have an air conditioner inside your truck. You, you are closed off from the from the brain, from the heat, from the snakes, from, you know and you just have a lot more control over your own job, you know, by dealing with. Possibly precision agricultural technology and actually having input on decision making in the harvest as a whole. Your salary is better since you have a bigger control over the impact of the harvest results. It's all around.
Yeah. It's all around better.
So another thing we associate with Brazil besides maybe it's large size, mechanical harvesting full sun farms is probably also frost events. When I was, I was recently in Anna cafe with a big collection of All the coffee producers or many coffee producers in Guatemala and everybody was following the weather in Brazil Everybody had their weather app and was looking at what is happening in Brazil right now this weekend. What's going to happen?
Because it not only impacts Brazil, but the rest of the world so Can you talk to us about the impact of climate change and and how your farm deals with it?
Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Yeah. Brazil and climate. It just impacts price so much. And yeah, it's a big one for farmers everywhere, I think. And you know, looking at climate collapse and climate change is just, you know, although All of the above that we just talked about is very much true. It's out under stress due to climate change. So the downside for this technology driven farming is that it was out designed for fulsome systems.
And the problem there is that without other trees, In or around the coffee plantation, your soil becomes poor and your coffee trees are less protected. And Brazil has seen that terrible frost in 2021, which affected everyone everywhere. And after that frost, it became very clear to us at MIO. That the full sun system we have applied, and that is applied in 90 percent of the coffee production in the country.
It's just not going to be enough to keep us producing coffee now that climate change is not something of the future anymore. You know, climate change is happening now, right now. It's not just the frost. But it's all the extreme weather conditions we're facing through the year.
You know, in a 12 month interval, you will now see extreme rains, hail storms, frost, extreme heat, draw, I swear to you, it's just shocking how much impact from the climate collapse we are already seeing daily as farmers. And since that frost, Things were never the same for coffee production, and I dare to say this harvest was the worst one thus far.
This is a completely different episode for the podcast I know on its own, but the temperatures in our region during winter this year Which is the harvest months are normally around 25, 26 degrees Celsius. And this year it went up to 30, 31 degrees Celsius. You know, the level of stress for the plants were so big that they changed their metabolic system and decided to go into survival mode. So our cherries that were maturing went from under ripe to over ripe without ever being ripe at all.
And. Does this going to have severe impacts on what people can expect from Brazilian flavor profiles for your, you know, consistent 84 points coffee? That is the base for a lot of specialty espresso blends out there. And all of this could be mitigated by planting forest areas and designing shading systems that work with mechanization. And, you know, for the current existing harvesters to work, you need three lines of coffee plants. with nothing in between them.
So you can run the harvester on both sides of a coffee line. And I also have a second truck next to it that will receive the coffee being harvested. It's kind of hard to explain.
It is hard to explain and Ana has shared a picture of a harvester in case I'll include that in the show notes If you've never seen one or you can just google Harvester in Brazil and you can get an idea of why you need that much space
so much. Yeah. So yeah, this means that for a harvester to work, you need at least three lines of coffee without any trees in between them. So, I know, how would you go about shading your plantation if you want to still use mechanization?
That's a, you know, kind of rhetorical question, but do you have some, some initial thoughts? Like, is there work to be done? Like, could you do it on the fourth rows or is, is the main solution to have enough native forest to compensate for the coffee? Maybe you can't bridge the two, but if you at least have both of those things, you can do it. Close to each other. Is that kind of the only solution so far?
That is the only solution so far that we can do with the technology that is available. So that's what we started doing in the farm since the frost of 2021. So we now have cedar trees, every tree lines of coffee. So that has become, well, not yet because the cedar is still growing, but the idea is that we have about 20 percent of shade from those trees. And then we are lucky enough to be surrounded by forest in most of our coffee plots.
So that is really helpful in terms of soil and in terms of controlling temperature and rain. So definitely as much forest as you can around and yeah, for now we can, we can deal with second trees in every four rows of coffee, which helps.
You know, I think that, like you mentioned, this idea of high yield and high volume gets kind of a bad name or people in specialty don't really want to talk about volume. They want to talk about quality, but if we're talking about coffee and the world, we can't. Not talk about volume.
One of the things that I was really surprising to me when I was in this, in a cafe presentation one of the presentations I saw was somebody talking about how Brazil is the only country that has consistently increased their coffee production and all the other countries, nobody can keep up, no one else is producing more coffee and this is bad for global coffee. And so we need.
To be smarter with the area that we have because we don't want to expand, but we're not really taking advantage of the coffee land that we have. And again, everybody, every other country, all 69 other countries that aren't Brazil are not producing more coffee. So I think that this is a really interesting story of how Brazil got to this point. So can you tell us what happened to Brazil's production from 1960 to 2023?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, actually I didn't know about that. So that's pretty Pretty impressive to know about. And yeah, I think the reason is behind the investment that Brazil started making as a, as a country from the 1960s onward. It went through a significant reform on farming and technology. And pretty much what happened is that the Brazilian government began to invest in the modernization of agriculture.
Through the generation off knowledge, which is, you know, investing in science and engineering together with universities and research institutes and then actually applying that knowledge in the field directly, you know, by having farmers on board and then the technology that was being created was also being disseminated and adapt to the farm reality. Almost immediately. So that new technological model included mechanical technology in the form of labor saving as we've been speaking about.
So just development and use of motorized equipment and also biological and chemical technology in the form of land saving. So new cultivars, new inputs, and yeah, during this period, Although we were living in a terrible dictatorship Brazil actually started to understand the importance of advancing science and advancing engineering to increase productivity. And this was the sole focus back then. And it continued to be in the following decades until recently, you know, productivity.
I think this is really important. And like I mentioned, I was. At the conference and again, it's put on by the Guatemalan government. It is all Guatemalan producers and yet about 50 percent of the presenters were Brazilian researchers. So there's a lot of there's a lot of relationship. I think now we're trying to form more relationship between Guatemala and Brazil. And it was really amazing to see all of the research coming out of Brazil.
We had, you might have to help me with some of these names. Marcelo Filho was talking about irrigation in coffee. Dr. Zambolim spoke about pests and diseases in different genetic, crosses. So there's genetic work, there's irrigation work. Dr. Evelyn Caixeta.
Yeah. That's really good.
spoke about how she applies molecular solutions like DNA sequencing to identify the right species for the right place. So right plant, right place. So you don't have to fight the environment so hard. And then we also had professor Flavio Boram speak about the importance of drying for getting higher quality which I really want to dig into because I think most people think of drying as kind of inert, like it's just preserving quality. He's proven with his research that drying can really improve.
And not just the longevity, but the actual physiological development of the coffee seed. So really good things are coming out of Brazil. I think that there's not enough attention put into that research? Cause it's pretty high level stuff. It's kind of impenetrable. We, you know, most coffee producers aren't sitting there reading the research, but there's good information coming.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of good information. Amazing discoveries happening that don't reach a lot of producers. And it's really cool to hear you speak about Flavio's research and on, you know, the drying stages. Because we, we're talking about full sun systems for the coffee production. But Brazil is not. It's actually very you know, in, in, in a sense, it's still very connected to the full sun drying on concrete pages and et cetera.
So it is a slow movement to kind of try to shade those, those drying pages and have some raised beds and, and things like that. So it's quite, quite interesting to, to hear about too. But yeah, the, the investment in coffee research in Brazil. is huge to this date. You know, we, we have two PhD researchers working as one as our director of operations and coffee quality. That's professor Lucas Lozada. And then as our. R and D. We have Professor Fabiana Carvalho.
So we understand that coffee production and science must walk hand in hand. You know it, which is also the reason we are starting our own research institute. And, you know, the data shows that Brazil's technological model actually works. You know, Brazil coffee productivity jumped from 6. 1 coffee bags per hectare in 1960 to 29, 000 point one bags per hectare in 2023.
So in 1960, the producing area of coffee in Brazil was of 4. 9 million hectares, which came to a total of 29 million coffee banks. And in 2023, the producing area was being reduced to 2. 2 million hectares. And was resulting in a total of 54. 7 million coffee bags is a lot of numbers. So what it means is that there was a 55 percent reduction in Brazil's producing area, but with an almost five fold increasing productivity.
And, you know, those impressive results are only partially due to the new machines, cultivars and agricultural inputs. In addition to having this tools available together with the knowledge about standardized crop management practices, the farmers were still struggling with a lot of uh, inter and intra field variability. You know, the farmer was still struggling to decide how to spend the resources where they were the most necessary in the field.
And the answer to that only came to Brazil in the 1990s when the precision agriculture started to be introduced in the country. Okay. So precision agriculture, precision agriculture is a farming management system that uses field data. To make decisions about crop needs, so it uses geo reference data collected by satellite imagers, for example, and then adds to other sources of information as soil composition, yield production and quality indicators.
Soil maps, things like that, and then all these measurements will be then analyzed and used to make decisions and make predictions on crop management.
So I want to highlight two things that you said about the, reducing The size where coffee is grown, reducing the area that's dedicated just a coffee, but also dramatically increasing the production, because I think that it's not for everybody, but it's definitely a model that the rest of the world can kind of adopt or should think about adopting if we want to have more space for. Native forest. Coffee is such a difficult crop on the environment in the way that we are growing it now.
So if we could reduce that area of the way that we're growing it now and then dedicate the new kind of rescued area into something else, I think that is, Very interesting to a lot of people and you don't have to sacrifice yield. So I just, you know, it's not something that's just for Brazil and I don't think it's something that's just for volume coffee. I think that it's still part of the conversation of quality.
And yeah, I want to apologize to everybody for making you wait 50 minutes to learn about precision agriculture, but I think it was important to, to get that, that background and that baseline about, you know, the context of. Brazil and how we got here. So can you give us an example of the type of data that Mio has collected and then that you've used from precision agriculture to make a different decision?
So the main goal with precision agriculture is to ensure that the right resources or products are placed at the correct place and the right time and the right amount. So it's not only about having the tools, but also about using them smartly. So by combining this in depth data acquisition with powerful, integrative, analytic, and predictive techniques, the information input provides unprecedented levels of automation. And it's efficient and it's precise.
So this means that we can reduce the use of chemicals and fuel. We can be more effective in the use of human labor. We can actually save money and actually minimize the environmental impact. And it also allows for better research to be carried out. You know, we we've been mentioning how having researchers involved in the business of farming is important.
And we do have two research happening at the farm at the moment that wouldn't be possible without this level of traceability that precision agriculture allows. And the first is absolutely connected to what we have discussed today. It is a project called Sombra, which means shade in Portuguese. We have separated a 15 hectares area of the farm that is incredibly prone to frost and all other extreme weather conditions. And it is a research project.
So in order to have a statistical confirmation, the area had to be divided into a number of smaller squares in which we'll task differentiate systems. And the idea is for us to find out which shade system works better for our farm in our region. To find out how to scale a shade system to be able to have a full 400 hectare farm under shade. And to try and find out a way to at least partially mechanize a shaded system in coffee in order to actually be able to scale it.
You know, it's a bit of what we've discussed today. How can we have shade and machines working at the same time? And the second project is regarding raising the bar in cup quality. So we call it Baja, which is bar in Portuguese. And the idea is that by the end. of this project, we can understand what drives quality in each of our farm areas, and we will then be able to know exactly what post harvest processing works best and results in the best possible quality for each of the farm areas.
So creating protocols for the wet mule and the dry mule. And that making sure that this results in the best quality coffee possible. So all of that will be based on scientific data they are collecting from the farm. And it wouldn't be possible without this traceability that we have. Both projects are under Dr. Lucas Lozada supervision. Which is our head of quality and our director of operations. And it's done in partnership with IFIS, which is a research institute in Brazil.
Project Sombra was developed in partnership with Assembly and Volcano, who are our clients in the UK. And Project Baja is with Watch House, which is another client of ours. And yeah, it's, it's really a dream to be able to put together a scientific innovation, coffee production, coffee roasting, and coffee shops, you know, all together. Looking into this and you know all sides of the coffee chain looking at a better and possible future for coffee You know, what else could we wish for?
Lots of exciting stuff coming, coming down the pipeline. I'm really thankful for your time. We have like two minutes. I was just remembering an example from your presentation about tractors and about tractors breaking down and something that you were doing to make it more efficient and not having to wait for parts. Could you share that with us real quickly?
Yeah, of course. So when a driver is working at a remote place at the farm, he might not have access to his cell phone because of, you know, there's not enough signal. And some places at the farm can be about 45 minutes away from the main office.
And if, in the past, if there was a problem in anything in the tractor, he would literally have to sit and wait for someone to pass by and drive him back to the office so he could let someone know that That the tractor was broken and then someone would have to drive all the drive back all the way there to fix it and then drive back.
So nowadays, with with the technology they have inside their tractors, they can just let the office know using the app from the precision agriculture software we use. And instantly someone at the office will have that information and will then ask for someone to go there and fix the tractor. So it's just a lot of time saving and efficient and, and just the amount of fuel that you, that you have to use to actually do that task. It's so much smaller.
So yeah, hour round, I think precision agriculture is, is the future.
I love that example because I think precision agriculture can sound a little bit intimidating and maybe it's about, you know, putting this exact right amount of nitrogen over here and then phosphorus over here and like, you know, kind of micro minerals and things like that. But that example to me was just so obvious of just having tools and working smarter, not harder and saving, you know, Resources, saving time, saving fuel,
Absolutely. It's all those three sustainability goals, you know, all in one, in one tool that you can use and actually make people's lives better and, you know, the quality better and everything better. So, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty impressive.
Awesome. And I thank you so much for your time. And there will be a lot of links in the show notes. If you want to see her presentation and get more familiar with Neo coffee. Thanks for making it to the end of another episode. This is episode 67, which means episode 70 is around the corner. And as long time listeners know every 10 episodes, I do a QA submitted by listeners. If you would like me to answer your question, you can submit it through Patrion or by replying to my newsletter.
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Thanks to you for listening and remember. Life's too short to drink bad coffee.