Knowledge pays the best interest. And his story of how education is the key to successful coffee farming.

In the middle of the 19th Century, Rafael Álverez Lalinde left the comfort and stability of his home country in Colombia in search of wealth and happiness in the wild frontier of El Salvador. With his family, he brought precious cargo including a caféto. Not just a coffee tree but a strain of the original Arabica coffee bean called “Typica.” Rafael had no idea that within two generations, his family would become one of the most influential families in coffee. In 2001, six generations after Rafael. Alvarez first introduced coffee to El Salvador, the industry was in trouble. A world-wide glut of coffee caused prices to tumble to an all time low. Many plantations like Topéca ceased operations because coffee beans had become more expensive to produce than they were worth on the open market. Despite these unfavourable conditions, Rafael Alvarez’s great-granddaughter, Margarita Lucia Díaz de López, convinced her son, Emilio, to help her save the family’s coffee legacy.

Emilio began his coffee career back in 2001 when he founded Topeca Coffee Roasters while still being a college student at the University of Portland ,OR, where he studied engineering management, environmental science, philosophy and international business. He became a member of the Roasters Guild in 2002 and has been an active member ever since. He now runs a full vertically-integrated business from seed to cup, with roasting, farming, exporting, and importing operations out of Brazil, the United States, and El Salvador. With coffee running through his veins, Emilio started travelling for knowledge and innovation. His first trip was to Brazil and the contrast was enormous: “Brazil is not just only biggest coffee producing country, also Brazil is 8th economy in the world. They produce aircrafts, cars, computers etc.. So they are 50 years ahead in farming also, in the way they manage their farms. And government does not interfere into coffee growing, and, comparing to El Salvador, it turns out to be better for the business itself.” What also socked Emilio was that he did not see poverty at all in the coffee-growing regions, unlike you see in every single other place in the world. He explains it as being the greatest accomplishment of mechanization and not relying on cheap labour.

The main lesson he learnt from his trips? Everything can be applied to your own operation; you just have to adapt it to your own reality, or your own circumstances. The only way to know if it can be done or not is by doing it yourself in your own farm. Wanting to bring same prosperity to his own region as the one he saw in Brazil, Emilio proclaimed a war with cheap labour. By now all of his coffees are sun grown and farms are completely mechanised. If mechanising seems like cutting of people, let’s look at it again, because at the end of the day it gives new opportunities and bigger salaries to people. As Emilio shared, at some point he had 200 employees, all of them earning minimum wage, as coffee industry depends on cheap labour. But he started to mechanize everything because he did not want to depend on someone climbing a tree, but rather hire someone who knows how to work with machines and be faster and safer. And of course this person would cost more. So he cut the amount of employees by 50%. At the end the 100 employees that stayed they earned 60-70% more than any other worker; of course, they needed to be re-educated but now their income is very different. And here is a good example of how their lives became better: 10 years ago 100% of Emilio’s employees took a bus every day to go to work; today there are about 25 motorcycles and at least 10 cars parked in their parking lot, all owned by the employees; they now are subjects to credit lines in banks, they have steady jobs. “I think this is the better change, rather than giving people the lowest salaries for their work. We have grown, not only in land but also in productivity. For example, national average is 4 bags per hectare, I produce 60.” Moreover, Emilio has some results to show even to people who strongly disapprove of machinery coffee picking, saying that the quality of this coffee is worse: in 2018 Emilio won Cup Of Excellence in El Salvador (with the highest score of 91.80) and the reason for it was to prove that coffee picked with the help of machines is not worse than hand-picked coffee.

Bringing more attention to higher cost of labour, higher life quality for coffee farmers and his employees and higher coffee quality, as a result, Emilio strongly emphasizes role of education for every coffee producer: “Love to the soil and to being a farmer, comes from very early stages of your life, that is why I take my kids to the farm. My daughter hates drinking coffee, but she knows that her future is related to coffee. People born on a farm, most of the time grow up working on the farm and at the end of the day lack skills for any other kind of work. That is why education is the key for successful farm, to understand what works and what doesn’t and to make it productive.” Three main lessons Emilio would give to anyone are learn and research, if you are not able to travel then go to a nearest workshop and then do everything yourself, because all the travelling and knowledge won’t help unless you use it.

Starting in 2001 with the goal to help his family to save the legacy, by now Emilio has bought back all of what used to be his grandparents’ farms, 280 hectares in total, producing about 20,000 coffee bags and out of those 90% are specialty coffee. With such results, Emilio still stays humble and encourages others by saying “If I was able to do it in El Salvador, it is possible to do everywhere”. Hopefully more and more farmers will look for new ideas and opportunities for brighter future of coffee growing.