THE COOPERATIVE

AGRARIA FRONTERA SAN IGNACIO

The cooperative was founded in 1969 and has 330 partners in 14 communities, where women growers are supported by several initiatives. Unusually, Peru has their own wet mill facility in San Ignacio, which provided the space and facilities for the experiment to be carried out.

Handpicking is done selectively, and floaters are skimmed from a basket of water. The cherries are then depulped without water before going through an 18-hour anaerobic fermenting stage. After that, the coffee is transferred to solar tunnels and dried on raised beds for 24 days. Each prospective contributor is then given a cup of coffee before the batch is blended for uniformity and bagged.

Sixteen committees form the cooperative Agraria Frontera San Ignacio or COOPAFSI. They are small coffee producers, and the organization provides coffee collection and marketing services; it also provides social and microfinance services to its partners. Often farmers can grow great coffee, but getting the word out to importers and roasters is not an easy skill, and a cooperative with an ability to do that proves it’s worth very quickly. The cooperative, which was founded in 1968, has a presence in the districts of La Coipa, Huarango, and Tabaconas, as well as San Ignacio, with the goal of “developing a competitive, sustainable agriculture with a sense of belonging and entrepreneurial capacity of its managers and workers, with national and international recognition for its trajectory and sustainable quality.”

Members can access various funding from the cooperative, which serves a wide range of requirements ranging from technical agriculture training to community development, health funds, and a microcredit institution.

Working in the buffer zones of a protected natural area necessitates adopting organic methods. Certification is crucial since these standards promote and establish a culture of preservation for animals and species at risk of extinction. The initiatives here are quality-driven, and they provide a wonderful incentive for farmers to live up to the objective of growing quality.

LA OSA COFFEE

La Osa coffee is named after the same spectacled bear which frequents the area called El Chaupe. It helps pollinate plants by carrying the pollen in its thick hair and opening spaces in the tree canopy, allowing light for germination and the growth of species in the lower forest.

Coffee is processed at the farm level, supplied as parchment to a cooperative warehouse in San Ignacio Town, and then transferred to the dry mill facilities in Chiclayo city. The dry-processing facility processes its own coffee and coffee from many other small-scale farmer groups (approx. 27 co-ops). The export section is situated here, as is another quality control laboratory with well-trained personnel that is also certified