Semi Natural H1 Black Honey

Finca Las Brisas, a farm located in the town of Juayua in the middle of the Apaneca Ilamatepec mountain range, is proof of how good farming practices, technology and expertise in post-harvest can change the future of coffee. While most Salvadoran coffee producers have been struggling with climate change, outbreaks of leaf rust and labour shortages (leading many to abandon their farms), Carlos Pola is on the other extreme of this stark reality with a healthy plantation, increasing production and outstanding quality.

Carlos comes from a family of farmers (he is the 5th generation) but has worked in the textile industry for 20 years before becoming fully dedicated to coffee. “The textile industry has been declining in El Salvador because neighbouring countries have a better competitive advantage. I wanted to move away to do something else and, having been involved in coffee my whole life through my family, I knew there were opportunities,” he recalls. 

“Coffee used to be something people would look into and tell you that you should be doing something else. However, the specialty industry brought a new wave of opportunities.” With that mindset, Carlos embraced coffee farming 20 years ago, still part time at first until 2012, when he could earn a living from coffee alone. Today, he manages Finca Las Brisas and 2 other farms from his family all by himself. And he has been determined to bring coffee farming to the 21st century by investing in technology and sustainability.  

Carlos describes his approach to farming as “dramatically new and sustainable”. He doesn’t produce washed lots because the process results in the contamination of water sources. The farmer is also a big believer in the power of Mycorrhizal fungi, a type of fungi that forms a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with the coffee plants. The fungi colonize the plant through their roots and establish a network of structures through which they exchange sugars and nutrients with the tree. 

“The plant provides carbohydrates in the form of sugars that it obtains from atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis; fungi in return provide nutrients and water to the plant. Fungi forms filaments (hyphae) that form a network (mycelium) that expands hundreds of times the capacity of the root and breaks down nutrients that would otherwise be inaccessible to the plant,” Carlos explains. 

According to the farmer, this is a technique that was used 50 years ago and has been replaced since by chemical fertilizers. “I have been doing this all over the farm for 6 years now and it really works! The fungi help restore the soil and capture soil humidity so that trees remain healthy even in months with no rain,” he says.  

When the leaf rust crisis hit Central America in 2012 and 2013, Finca Las Brisas was badly affected as most farms in the area. Carlos decided to renovate most of the farm with new varieties that are more resistant to the disease. This factor is very significant for El Salvador, where many producers stick to the traditional production of the Bourbon variety due to its good reputation for cup quality. 

“In El Salvador, it is a sin to plant anything but Bourbon or Pacas. But Bourbon is so complicated to maintain... You end up using a lot of fungicide. My thinking was that I had to look into other varieties and become an expert in coffee and processing methods. You have to be completely professional on the mill. If you do that, you can work with any coffee. After the crisis, I started renovating and spent 6 years at 15% capacity. I had to reinvent myself. So I kept Pacamaras and Pacas, which are more resistant, and planted a lot of hybrid varieties I already had.”

Other than replanting, Carlos changed the architecture of the farm. “‘Why is it that everyone plants coffee in squares going down the hill?’ I asked myself. I asked others too and no one seemed to know the answer. I decided to plant my new trees in rows following the contours of the farm like they do in Brazil,” he remembers. Carlos is referring to contour farming, a practice which consists in planting trees along a line of same elevation to conserve rainwater and prevent erosion, a big problem in El Salvador. The plantation looks like a spider web from above, under the tree canopy (Carlos grows trees which help to fix nitrogen in the soil).

Las Brisas is also innovative in the use of technology. “I developed an app that traces the coffee from farm to cup through QR codes,” Carlos explains. Workers of the farm can access a database through their mobile phones and input information in real time, tracing batches daily from the moment they enter the mill to the moment when they leave the warehouse. On top of that, Carlos is always experimenting with new processing techniques and recipes to get the best out of his cherries - which he only picks when they are “Ferrari red” - and to bring new flavours to roasters. As he puts it, he is not on the business of “selling fruit”, but experiences.

Finca San Antonio, one of Carlo's farms, produced a Pacamara that was used by World Champion Dan Fellows in both 2018 and 2019 Coffee in Good Spirits Competitions.