Colombia Viviana Realpe

30-year old Viviana farms alongside her husband Pablo, occasionally with some help from their 8-year old son Juan Pablo. Her 7 hectare farm, inherited from her father, is between 1650 - 1700 masl, and she has a variety of trees: 8000 pink bourbon trees (planted 7 years ago), 15,000 caturra, 5,000 variedad colombia, and 2,000 castillo which she sells locally.

To process, she starts with ripe cherries, and she floats them in water to remove the under-and over-ripe cherries. From there, she carefully stores the cherries in a sealed Grain Pro bag, and they begin their fermentation process within the cherry. After 28 hours of this initial “cherry-ferment”, she de-pulps the coffee, and leaves it to ferment in water, constantly stirring and cleaning the water- for up to 40 hours. During peak harvest seasons, she pays a significantly higher price to pickers, which allows her to ask that they only pick ripe cherries. Friends and family from her husband’s side of the family from Nariño (with a primary harvest season in different months) also come in to help with picking. This is the fourth lot of her pink bourbon harvest that was large enough for us to purchase. Viviana and her family recently built a dryer that’s large enough to dry 1000 kg (that’s pretty big!), and they’re looking forward to larger production, thanks to increased yields because of careful pruning. She and her family are moving slowly towards organic production- they’re
worried about their yields going down, which could be devastating from an economic
perspective. We’ve advised her (like we do to all producers) that we encourage her transition towards organics to be slow, thoughtful and planned out. The farm is on a steep hillside, which makes bringing fertilizer, organic material, and other farm inputs to the trees a difficult task. They recently built a pulley/bridge system to bring bags from one part of the farm to another with more ease and efficiency. The family had previously used coffee processing infrastructure- like de-pulpers, fermentation tanks, and dryers- from Viviana and Pablo’s parents’ farms, but last year they invested in the materials to build a ceramic tile-lined fermentation tank, and they purchased a de-pulper, and built a dryer on their own farm.

Viviana is a member of Los Guácharos- a group of independent, quality-focused small
producers in southern Huila (close to Pitalito). The group is collectively converting to organic agriculture, making their own fertilizers and fungicides, installing complex water filtration systems that use gravity, stones and sand to remove all mucilage residues from waste water to not contaminate water systems.