What’s in a name? Why many Mexican coffee producers forego naming their coffee farms
As we await the landing of fresh Mexican coffees, now is the perfect time to talk about an interesting element of production in the country. Though you may be used to coffee farms in Central and South America with names that describe their beauty or magnificence, many Mexican farms have no name at all.
This is because the average producer in Oaxaca and Chiapas owns and works on several small fields placed all around village they live in. Overall this structure can vary, as each village has its own way of organising coffee production.
Some are organised as private entities, where land is bought, sold, and passed onto children. Others are entirely communal, where parcels of land are shared and tended as a collective. Across many parcels of land, harvests are a community effort, rather than a coffee farmer employing pickers for the season.
Usually, a group from the community picks cherry on a farmer’s land, who prepares lunch for the team as thanks.
Romulo Chavez, making lunch for the day’s coffee pickers, Paraje Los Machos, Oaxaca
Here we see the difference between communal and private land in Oaxaca, where the majority of the coffees we supply are grown. The red marks the privately owned land, and the green the communal. Understanding the nuances of how a community chooses to manage their land is an important factor in sustainable development in the future of that region.
To zoom out, the vast majority of Mexico’s 500,000 coffee producers are smallholder farmers growing coffee on one hectare or less, with an average annual production at just 100kg. Coffee farming in Mexico is becoming more and more unsustainable, fuelling widespread migration to urban centres in Mexico and the United States. In short, coffee production is disappearing.
To support what could be seen as a dwindling crop for so many, our goal is to help improve the overall profitability and viability of coffee production for producers in Oaxaca. After improving the payment system, our focus has been building stable demand from specialty coffee roasters, like you!
Picking cherry, Paraje Los Machos, Oaxaca