Maria Nila Heredia is a first generation coffee farmer, who along with her husband and two sons manage a 3ha farm called Los Cedros in the El Paraiso village in Huabal district. Maria Nila and her husband, Rey, spent most of their youth travelling around Jaen and San Ignacio working in farms and buying small plots of land wherever they went to plant vegetables and living off of their production. Until they were in their 30s the pair were vegetable farmers, which they sold in the markets in Jaen, but after saving up enough money to buy a larger plot of land they decided to plant coffee, which was more investment but they saw it as a more profitable crop and stable life at the time. Maria Nila was one of the first people to populate El Paraiso and she was able to buy a relatively large plot of land, which is now divided between the family members.

Maria’s farm sits at an altitude of 1800 and goes up to around 1900 at it’s peak, ideal elevation for growing quality coffee. She had previously planted caturra, bourbon and more recently catimors, before deciding to plant different, new (in Peru) varieties such as gesha and java, which were recommended by her two sons. Maria planted the gesha seeds in 2021 and in 2024 they produced their first main harvest. Aside from coffee, Maria’s farm is planted with plantain, banana, guaba (inga, a native nitrogen fixing fruit tree), lucuma (Peruvian fruit, like a sweet avocado) and cedars (hence the name, los cedros).

Processing
Maria has yet to experiment much with fermentation on the gesha variety, but she applied the same processing method as she does to her caturra and bourbon, which is a 36 hour fermentation in tiled tanks. The fresh cherry is rinsed clean of dirt and floated to remove lower quality beans, once clean and sorted, the cherry is pulped the same day it was picked. The pulped cherry is placed in tiled fermentation tanks where it ferments for one day and two nights, or around 36 hours. After fermentation is complete the coffee is washed twice in fresh spring water to remove the mucilage.

Drying
Maria recently invested in new parabolic dryers, along with her sons who are also growers of high quality coffee and they decided to invest in drying infrastructure in order to improve the quality and longevity of their coffee. After fermentation the coffee is pre-dried in the sun for a couple of hours to remove excess water before being placed on raised beds inside a parabolic dryer where it dries for 15 days.

Peru is one of the world's top ten coffee producers—number one when it comes to organic coffee—with smallholders making up the vast majority of growers. Nearly 225,000 families rely on coffee for the majority of their income.

For the first century after its introduction from Ecuador in the mid-18th century, coffee was grown primarily for domestic consumption. However exports began to grow towards the end of the century and when the Peruvian government defaulted on a loan to the British in the early 1900s it offered 2 million hectares of land as payment—much of which was promptly converted into coffee plantations which helped boost production.

Like much of Latin America, coffee production in the early days was dominated by large landowners, although land reform and other changes in the mid-20th century shifted ownership towards smaller farmers. Today Peru is the world's 9th largest exporter of coffee, and top when it comes to organic coffee, with smallholders making up the majority of growers.

Did you know?

• Coffee plantations occupy as much as 40% of farmland nationally, and up to 70% of farms situated in the Peruvian highlands.
• Peru is the world's largest exporter of organic coffee, with roughly 90,000 hectares certified organic. In addition, a large portion of the country's coffee is organic by default, which has been attributed to the number of smallholder farmers who lack the capital to invest in chemicals.
• Peru's coffee farmers are overwhelmingly small-scale, with the average producer growing coffee on just under three acres. Cooperatives can help small farmers gain access to credit facilities and larger export markets.

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Sourced in partnership with: Chacra
Producer relationship length: 1 year