This is our second coffee from the village of Colón Genova and the amazing producer collective behind Argote Specialty Coffee. Last year's female-produced coffee went down a storm. This year we chose a lot that was grow and cared for by two neighbours from the same village, Jesus and Gerardo. It's frutiy and creamy and incredibly moreish and we can't wait to hear what you think!
 
Social Kontext:
 
We are buying this coffee through our main green coffee supplier This Side Up from the Netherlands. It comes from the small and rather remote village of Colón Genova on the border of the departments of Nariño and Cauca. Here, father and son team Efrain and Juan Pablo Argote have been revolutionising the ways coffee has been grown and processed in this area for over 100 years. Juan Pablo moved back to his family farm after living and studying in the big city and started to realise the potential the coffee from their region actually held. He met Lennart from This Side Up in 2014 and they hit if off immediately, speaking the same language of what they both want a sustainable coffee supply chain to look like. With the help of this new partnership, the Argotes started improving their farm infrastructure, their on-farm processing of coffee, they started experimenting to improve quality and diversity of lots and slowly won over friends and neighbours in the village to follow their lead and come together to do their own exporting. Today, not a farmer in the village of Génova is untouched by the influence of the regenerative, organic and direct trade messages that the Argote project has been sending out. 
 
This particular lot is produced by two individual coffee growers from Colón Genova - Jesús Cerón and his neighbour Gerardo Muñoz.
 
Environmental Kontext:
 
In 2018 the Argote family with the help of This Side Up set up an Agroforestry Training Hub that allows farmers in Nariño and the surrounding area to learn about sustainability, biofertilisation, and the use of the digital tools that can eventually lead them to commercialise their coffee in a transparent, sustainable, and traceable way, adapted to the current specialty coffee market. Their goal is to inspire more farmers to see the real potential of coffee cultivation in the area, promote sustainable and regenerative practices, soil health,  and bio fertilisation, as well as promote gender equality in the region. In a country where the government heavily subsidises artificial inputs like fertilisers and pesticides, the educational work that is achieved at the training facility is rare and very precious! Find out more about this amazing project.
 
Economic Kontext:
 
The example of Argote Specialty Coffee  and the village of Colón Genova shows just how greatly one can impact a community by buying coffee straight from smallholder farms. When this collaboration started, our friends at This Side Up sat down with Juan Pablo and  calculated that if five containers of the village's specialty coffee could be sold through direct channels, there would be enough money to provide adequate food supplies, health care, and education for everyone there. It didn’t take long before they started discussing how they could work together to reach these goals and they have been working towards this dilligently evcer since.