El Porvenir - Colombia 2020 Verified listing

Luis Orlando is the second generation of coffee growers in his family. In 1948 his parents who are originally from Caicedonia, Valle del Cauca arrived to Palestina due to violence issues. At that time there were not so many people producing coffee.

Luis Orlando began producing specialty coffee 10 years ago with the idea of producing different profiles. He started this project with 2 hectares of Castillo, then Tabi and Gesha were grown. Luis explains that he encountered some issues with the Gesha variety as it was from the beginning a very difficult and delicate variety, at the beginning he needed to find support from other friends growing coffee with organic practices and step by step his crop began to improve. Luis acknowledged the importance of having the right tools for constant evaluation and improvement, this brought him to create an association of coffee growers and through this project get all the equipment necessary to build a coffee lab and with trained people continue to improve and get constant training.

One of the biggest challenges of producing high quality coffees is to create awareness about doing things right and motivate his coworkers to always deliver the best results.

Luis Orlando has been interested in microbiology and how he can keep recovering the soil of his farm by using organic fertilizers in the near future.