Antonio Medina Guatemala

Antonio Medina is a fourth generation coffee grower, with twenty-plus years on the farm himself. Like most small producers in Guatemala, he used to sell in cherry. About ten years ago he switched to drying his own parchment and selling at differentiated prices, and that one change put five daughters through university. He's hoping to buy a guardiola next (a mechanical dryer), so he's not stuck depending on weather and patio space the way he is now. He's also handed over the upper part of his farm to members of the local indigenous community who work it alongside him.

Only a quarter of Antonio's property is planted in coffee: about 56 hectares, split evenly between caturra and bourbon (a good share of the bourbon right now is recovering from a hard pruning). The rest of the farm is native forest, which is protected by Guatemalan government who pays him to keep it that way. The water he uses for processing comes off the farm too and falls under the same protections.

For shade he uses chalúm (a native legume tree), plus pine and cedar, and he only prunes the shade trees during the full moon: which according to lunar gardening is when a plant's fluids pull down into the roots, so the cuts actually slow regrowth instead of just wounding the tree for nothing. The soil is full of large rocks and boulders, good for erosion control, and the farm is home to plenty of squirrels, rabbits, and snakes.

Antonio's been processing his own coffee for several years now, with the help of 70 pickers and farm workers. Cherry gets de-pulped and dropped into open tanks with a little water, where it ferments for about 36 hours before it's washed and moved to the patio to dry for nine or ten days. He fertilizes with the best inputs he can get, which means he needs less of them and applies less often. Coffee pulp gets composted rather than dumped, then returned to the farm as fertilizer. Weeding is done by hand. For roya, he sprays twice a year, using the least toxic product on the market.