Initiatives

What can we do to improve the lives of coffee farm workers?

We want to start a good works project: If you are a roaster, you can pick one of our coffees and together we can pick a project to support. From the sale of the coffee, we will make a donation to support the project.

For example, if we donate 1 eur or usd for every retail bag sold, the whole coffee community is participating. The consumer gets to make a choice, if they buy this coffee bag, not only are they getting a delicious coffee, they also support a good cause and they get to tell their friends a great story.

Together, as a coffee community, we can make contributions to benefit the lives of coffee producers and farm workers.

Here are some ideas of projects we’d like to implement. Let us know if you want to join any of these initiatives, send us an email: hello@productor.coffee

Children’s Nursery - Initiative #1

In El Salvador, coffee harvest happens during the long school break, so children are not in school, what are parents supposed to do with them? The parents have to go work at farms, they don’t want to leave their children alone at home, so they end up bringing them to work.

People are rightfully concerned about the possibility of child labor in farms. We don’t want this to happen, so let’s provide an alternative. This project would provide funds to create children’s nurseries in farms, to train and employ people as day care workers and to provide a meal and learning materials to all children enrolled in the program.


Solar Power - Initiative #2

A lot of farms do not have electricity. Instead of waiting around for the government to finally add them to the grid, we can set up solar panels on at farmhouses. This would mainly benefit farm workers, creating a more hospital environment for them.


Compost Toilets - Initiative #3

Most farms do not have running water and are not connected to a sewer system. Water is scarce in many mountains and the only available water is rain water or water brought on a pipe truck. If we have very little water and want to create an environment with safe, sanitary bathrooms, probably the best solution is to have compost toilets.

Your poo is rich in nitrogen, mix it with carbon sources, such as dry leaves, branches which are readily available in farms, and after a while it all decomposes into compost, which you can use to fertilize your farm. A full circle of nutrients!


Ping Pong Tables - Initiative #4

You can say this is a non-essential, but hey, everyone has a right to have fun! Coffee pickers work hard all day picking cherry, once they’re done, there’s gotta be something fun to do at the farmhouse. Why not play ping pong? This is about little changes that improve people’s quality of life, bring laughter into people’s lives.


Salvadoran Space Agency - Initatives #5

Did you ever make a homemade rocket when you were a kid, maybe in summer camp? They’re easy to build, little cardboard rockets that you get to shoot up into the sky. It could be a fun day for farm kids, make your own rocket and shoot it off. Maybe we’d have to do this in the rainy season so we don’t start forest fires! But hey, this page is for brainstorming, so we dare to sound ridiculous.

This fun activity would teach kids about science, gravity and space exploration. And it might inspire someone to look beyond the possibilities of farm work.


Medical Clinic in a Big Farm - Initiative # 6

We think this should be done in a big farm because that would mean there are a lot of coffee workers there, possibly not very close to a clinic. So, if a farm provides the land, we can build a clinic, that would be available for the farm workers and if the budget allows, also the community nearby. This would be a larger budget and more ambitious project than the previous ones.


Financing Farm Purchase - Initiative #7

This is about empowering farm workers. We’d like to find the most hardworking and responsible farm workers and help them buy their own farm, 10 to 20 hectares to grow coffee and other crops to support their family.

People keep moving to the city searching for work, farm work is looked down upon. Let’s help make it sustainable, a world of healthy small holder farmers producing delicious foods and drinks is a great cause to support.


Cashew Farm - Initiative #8

This pandemic has made us reflect and we want to also produce food. A great produce of Latin America is cashews, cashew trees grow on the lowland, by the seaside, where in El Salvador you usually find sugar cane plantations.

Sugar is the most pointless and damaging agricultural product, not only for your body but also for the earth. You have huge tracts of land where nothing grows but this grass, which they cut down every year, leaving empty soil which easily erodes. In El Sal, they even purposely burn the sugar cane plantations to make harvest easier.

Can you imagine this still happens in the 21st century, burning down their fields…killing all life, all nutrients, every year becoming more dependent on agro-chemicals.

Let’s buy a sugar cane plantation and turn it into a cashew forest which will provide delicious, nutritious cashews, instead of unhealthy sugar.

These are some ideas, if any of them inspire you and you want to collaborate, or if you have ideas of your own, get in touch!

hello@productor.coffee

Hoping to do great projects together with you,

Rodolfo