Fancy flavor or employee?

I'd rather pay health benefits to employees than ferment my coffees with expensive processing methods.

Hi everyone! I'm Angela Serna, a proud coffee grower from the area around Circasia, Quindio, Colombia. My grandfather was a coffee farmer from Salamina, Caldas, a region known in Colombia for coffee growing. My father, who grew up on my grandfather's coffee farm, as he grew up bought the land where we now live. This was in 1996. Dad wanted his family to have a similar experience to his own.

For many years... we didn't live on our farm. My father kept it alive and enjoyed a very limited amount of nugget coffee, which he brought to our home in the Chicago suburbs once in a while.

Angela Serna explains the importance of hygiene in the fermentation process.

Back in the States, my dad roasted our coffee himself in the garage. My parents had always hoped that when they retired they would live on a coffee farm. However, it turned out that this dream would be much harder for them to achieve than they expected. Although our land is a beautiful place to live, managing a productive coffee farm requires much more work than they were willing to do on their own.

Hence, eight years ago, we decided to return to Colombia all together and take care of the farm “in earnest.” Since then it has been me, not only living and working on the land, but we also produce roasted coffee as our Pure Heart brand.

For many coffee farmers in Colombia, making a living solely from growing coffee is difficult, if not impossible. You need additional income from other work. As with most commodities, the coffee industry has widened the gap between those who produce the goods and those who profit from their sale.

While my siblings and I greatly valued having the land in our family, we knew we couldn't afford to maintain it ourselves. This also meant that we couldn't afford not to make the necessary changes that would lead to true sustainability. So our family decided to really develop the farm's infrastructure to build a sustainable coffee growing business. Today, with love, passion and commitment, we are investing in a fair and profitable future.

Angela has a well-equipped room for working on quality control of green coffee.

When I joined my parents on the farm in 2016, I realized how much potential surrounded us and decided that this would be my new life project: to make this farm sustainable in all possible forms. My goal was to create a coffee farm that would be both productive and ecological, protecting our soils, streams and forests while becoming a professional business.

A huge part of running a successful business is labor rights and relations, an issue we will explore in the next few weeks on the Red Ink Coffee blog. Coffee farms in Colombia are not profitable enough for workers to have all the benefits to which they are legally entitled; this creates an ongoing cycle of poverty....

Coffee farmers who cannot afford to pay full benefits often exploit the most vulnerable members of our society, who have few employment opportunities elsewhere. Farmers complain about the lack of available labor, but are unwilling to offer adequate compensation.

As a business owner and employer myself, I am reluctant to sell products that sacrifice the welfare of workers in order to make a profit.

Her farm is called La Floresta and is like a wild fores.

My profits are not a success if my workers are not paid a decent wage. This is still a controversial topic, as many farmers are more interested in buying state-of-the-art processing equipment and exotic fermentation yeast than investing in the health, safety and overall well-being of their workers.

Today's specialty coffee market is more focused on wild and innovative flavors than on the social impact the product can have.

Mismanagement of resources and production of goods has led to significant inequalities not only in Colombia, but around the world. These inequalities lead to desperation and inevitably to social conflict, as we have seen in Colombia for more than 60 years. Our challenges as farmers in Colombia are no different than many other farms and agricultural products around the world. While many of the topics I want to discuss in future blog installments will be from a Colombian perspective and will relate to our national labor laws, the general concepts will be of global relevance, sure to resonate with you no matter where you live.

I believe we are moving toward a social change where we will be forced to appreciate real, healthy products, where the quality of our food will become more important than a purse or a collection of clothes, and where farmers will be recognized for the heroes they truly are.

I hope to help you learn to idolize the people who produce the food you eat, as much as any influencer you follow on Instagram.