Bella Vista (Carlos Damian Rodríguez)

The story

Carlos worked first as a day laborer and then as a vegetable farmer, saving enough to acquire several plots suitable for coffee. Bella Vista is one of those farms. After initially producing for the commercial market, advice from Benjamín Paz at Beneficio San Vicente encouraged Carlos to process coffee for specialty buyers.

Challenges

Carlos identifies high agricultural-input costs and scarce harvest labor as major challenges.

Innovations

For the documented washed lot, cherries are depulped each afternoon, fermented dry in tanks for 18 hours, rinsed seven times, then sun-dried in parabolic dryers for 15–20 days and hand-sorted for visible defects.