Sanson Garcia Luna has been a coffee producer for almost his entire life. He’s a notoriously hard worker, favoring days that begin at sunrise and ending only when he’s finished all his to-do’s, even if it’s late at night. Sanson is the younger brother of Pompilio Garcia Luna, the leader of a Yogondoy-based producer group we work with.
Sanson works his 2 farms, El Duraznal and a plot in Cerro La Bruja every day. Although 2 farms means double the work, Sanson is a forward thinker and knew from the beginning that the best way to improve his crops was to cultivate more of them so that he could practice crop rotation, giving adequate between-harvest rest, food, and care to one while the other produced coffee. One example of this is pruning, something many coffee producers can’t do since it means losing part of the harvest which is the only economic support they get all year. Sanson on the other hand has an organized pruning plan on each farm allowing for the decrease in production on one, balanced by the increase in production from the other.
All this double effort from Sanson is for one purpose only: giving a better life to his 4 children, in whom he tries to cultivate similar vision and forward-thinking habits.
Sanson, like his brother and the other farmers in Yogondoy, grows the Pluma variety and has exponentially improved its quality and yield due to the improvements that the Yogondoy producers, promoted by the Garcia family, have applied to their crops.
This is a great example of the larger effort and results we see in San Vicente Yogondoy at large: quality crop care that over time has led to annual increases in yield where surrounding regions see biannual yield cycles. A lush, densely forested community in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca in the district of Pochutla, Yogondoy’s steep slopes harbor coffee under a thick, dynamic canopy of native shade trees facing the Pacific Ocean to the south and receiving very distinct rainy and dry seasons with cooling Pacific breezes.
Yogondoy has a high level of plant diversity on the coffee farms compared to other coffee-growing areas. Local producers use native trees such as Cuachepil, Cuil, and/or avocado to shade their coffee trees. These trees provide not only shade, but also various benefits such as food, ornamentation, medicine, construction materials, and water collection. For instance, the Cuil has leaf litter that adds a rich fertilizer to the soil.
Yogondoy is one of the few communities in which we see a year on year increase in both yield and quality. The producers here have invested a lot in their crops for 8 years, leading to production between 1000-2000 kg per hectare of dry parchment—nearly double that of many other Mexican coffee-growing areas.
Getting to San Vicente Yogondoy from Oaxaca takes approximately 5 hours via road. That road is in good condition, so the real challenge is getting from the town of Yogondoy out to the farms. Unlike many other producing areas where producers live on their farms, Yogondoy’s producers usually live in the central town with their farms only reachable by 2-3 hours on foot or mule. During harvest, producing families usually stay in temporary housing on the farms, during which they have to move their coffee by mule or on foot over the course of several trips to the city.
Yogondoy’s indigenous Zapotec traditions and language are alive and well. In Zapotec, Yogondoy means River of Bees, and many local farmers keep beehives for honey and pollination alongside their coffee. Many of the farmers in this group have younger coffee trees that were planted in the last 5 years and continue the tradition of maintaining almost 100% of the Pluma variety, a local mutation of Typica that has grown here for over 80 years. It thrives in these conditions, soil, and climate, producing spectacular cup quality. Many of the farmers are also under 30 years old, an encouraging fact showing that coffee has a future here. However, a percentage of young people are also migrating to the capital in search of better opportunities.
Another tradition still very present in the Zapotec community in the area is the practice of Tequio (a word from the Nahuatl language that means work or tribute), a practice of communal workshare that comes into play during harvest and in off-season renovations.
Sanson’s lot is a perfect example of the work of Yogondoy as a producing community and the fruit that communal work bears.
