Ecuador | Leonidas Asdrubal Apolo Granda, Nueva Vida
Loja
Along with his daughter, Mireya, and her husband Freddie, Asdrubal works his five-hectare farm near Puyango in Loja, the southwesternmost region in Ecuador. Fifteen years ago he had a different farm in a neighboring area that was destroyed by frost. Asdrubal has always loved coffee so when he had the opportunity in 2017 to buy this farm he didn’t hesitate.
His father taught him about coffee production as a teen. He used to manually crush-mill and sell to the local market until Caravela arrived in the area. Caravela first imported his coffee in 2022 and we subsequently bought the entire lot! Then, in September 2023, our green buyers visited the farm to meet Asdrubal and purchase his 2023 harvest directly.
This is truly a small-scale family operation: aside from Asdrubal, Mireya, and Freddie, they employ 3-4 pickers during harvest. Asdrubal provides them a weekly wage in contrast to paying based on the weight of cherries picked.
For the 2023 harvest, Asdrubal produced about 400kg of parchment. This ultimately converted to around five 69kg bags of green coffee.
All his coffee cherry is honey processed on covered raised beds. The cherry is floated and then fermented in covered tanks for 70 hours. It is then depulped without water and taken straight to the raised beds where it is rotated during a two-week drying period.
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