Fazenda Progresso
Fazenda Progresso
The Story
Fazenda Progresso is an old family farm, spanning 3 generations, from the mountainous Chapada Diamantina region of Bahia, northern Brazil. Amokka® started working with the family back in 2013 and hasn’t looked back.
Fazenda Progresso has a focus on social initiatives, and together we have developed several programmes through our Impact Trade initiative. Worker welfare, and their family’s welfare, is important to the Borré family and is the core of most projects started with the support of Amokka®.
In fact, work clothing, sunscreen and other safety equipment is supplied and paid for by the family. Farm workers are organised in several geographical sectors throughout the farm, and in most of them the uniform colour is a bright, almost-cerulean blue. There’s no specific reason for this colour, but it means that workers are easily identified in the fields, further contributing to safety.
Today the Borré son, Fabiano, runs the coffee farm and constantly invests in new techniques and technologies, infrastructure, and workplace enhancements. Experimenting with processing is something they are doing more and more, with raised bed drying, fermentation methods and carbonic maceration - they were even accepted into Cup of Excellence.
The aim for Fazenda Progresso is to convert the farm to become 100% organic.
The Farm
The Borré family has invested heavily in developing Progresso’s coffee infrastructure with a production area of 1000 acres. The farm has built its own processing facilities on-site, which produce washed, pulped natural and natural coffees. Progresso’s coffee division currently employs some 200 permanent workers, which swells to between 400 and 500 during harvest season. Progresso collects rainwater in huge reservoirs during rainy season as 100% of the farm is irrigated.
The harvest usually runs from June until September, during which the first two passes are picked by hand. We mostly buy pulped natural process coffee from Progresso - the ripe cherries are pulped and then dried in the sun on concrete patios for 24 hours with the sticky mucilage still attached. They are then finished off in guardiola dryers until they reach the optimum humidity level. The beans are rested and stored in parchment until immediately prior to export. Approximately 70% of all production is destined for international specialty markets.
Nursery for the coffee trees where they grow strong before being planted out to the fields.
The berries are handpicked - here the yellow berries are used for fermented coffees.
The berries are dried in the sun on concrete patios.
At the farm they test all batches with cupping.
Projects
Amokka® has several ongoing projects with Fazenda Progresso as part of our Impact Trade initiative.
Fabiano and Silvio are respected by the locals for their many initiatives. Not many farms in Brazil are run this way, with social responsibility, fair wages, and such as central to their operations.
One of the many projects is this school Fazenda Progresso has built for the children of the farm workers.
