Eliezer Jose Calvi is a small farmer in the mountainous municipality of Castelo, in south central Espírito Santo state. His coffee is a rare mixture of small scale and high quality, hand picked by family members and dried on raised beds. This type of production more closely mimics the steep family farms of Colombia than the vast, mechanized estates that dominate Brazil’s popular coffee imagery. This particular lot is far brighter in balance than almost anyone expects for a pulped natural Brazil, of any type or quality: flavors range from passion fruit to apple candy and red grapes, with the mineral florality of oolong tea. If it weren’t for the delicate sweetness and soft body, it would be almost impossible to tell it was a Brazil at all.
Espirito Santo and its Small Farmers
Espírito Santo is a relatively small, coastal state in southeastern Brazil, nudged in between the mighty Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro states. Coffee-wise it is a state of high contrast. Espírito Santo produces the majority of Brazil’s “conilon” robustas and is still mostly known for this output. But the state also has some impressively mountainous areas inland whose farmers, at 800+ meters in such southern latitudes, have more in common with Colombia or Peru specialty growers than most of Brazil. The southern inland mountains of Espirito Santo range from arid to dense, humid and cold. The area is home to numerous small coffee farmers including some prominent cooperatives and organic estates. Coffee ranges from accessible to remote, but the quality of this region is also renowned in Brazil--lots of mountain towns in Espírito Santo draw Brazilians from coastal cities to the fresh air, eco lodges, waterfalls, European restaurants, and local coffee.
While it’s true that 500+ hectare estates dominate Brazil’s production, still about half of the country’s coffee farmers have small, family-managed operations, processing at home and selling to local growers’ organizations to earn their living. Smaller farms tend to be clustered in the more difficult landscapes for coffee efficiency—the ones that are steep and forested, difficult to access, or at higher elevations where the climate is more challenging for coffee to thrive. The Castelo municipality is one such area.
Eliezer Jose Calvi
Eliezer is in his 8th year producing specialty coffee. He connected with the exporter of his coffee, FAF Coffees, in 2016, and through a local outreach program they were offering, called “Lado a Lado”, began learning how to renovate his land and harvesting techniques right away. Today he produces exclusively pulped natural coffee, depulping the cherry and moving immediately to dry on raised beds that are covered to protect the coffee from the region’s humidity.
The family farm, Sítio Vista Linda, is 10 hectares in size and has both catuai and catucai cultivars planted. Harvest is entirely family-run with the help of 1-2 local laborers. Harvest here is very slow, lasting many months, which increases harvest costs and makes coffee drying and storage more difficult due to the changing climate (going from winter to summer in Brazil).
FAF Coffees and the “Other” Brazil
FAF Coffees is a specialty exporter in Brazil founded by the Croce family. During their years spent struggling to revive the soils of their own family farm in the Mogiana region, the Croce family connected with like-minded small growers struggling as well to make farming viable for the next generation. Over time, the Croce family estate, “Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza” (Environmental Fortress Farm), started sharing their approach to land management, and exporting other producers’ coffees to buyers they had come to know.
Farmers working with FAF have a strong focus on their immediate ecosystems—the watersheds and canopies that made the land worth living on—as well as quality in the cup, as a means to economic independence and self-esteem. Over the years the Croce family's network of farmers grew. FAF now exports coffee on behalf of more than 250 small and sustainable farms throughout the Mogiana, Sul de Minas, and Espírito Santo regions. In all places they have mobilized entrepreneurial small growers dedicated to the same combination of cup quality, environmental health, and community strength, exuberantly referred to in the FAF network as “total quality”.
