The trip to San Lucas Zoquiapam starts with a flight to Oaxaca, followed by 4 hours travel by paved road and another hour on dirt road. On this trip we pass through several parts of the Cuicatlán biosphere reserve.
The farms in the Zoquiapam area are located 15 to 20 minutes from the dirt roads. Farmers can move their coffee from their farms to the collection point on foot or by truck.
Producers usually have their own processing stations at home. Most in this area soak their coffee for 18-24 hours in wooden tanks, then dry it for 6-10 days on raised beds or petates.
Producers usually keep a distance of 2 meters between rows and 1.5 meters between seedlings. Between each row, producers place a plant that serves to separate the rows and keep the coffee trees apart.
Producers use native trees such as ice cream bean trees and pines to shade their coffee trees. These trees provide not only shade, but also various benefits such as food, ornamentation, medicine, construction materials, and water retention. Zoquiapam producers produce corn, beans and lumber apart from coffee. They transport their coffees via mule. A leading producer in the area has organized his family to collect all of the coffees and bring them to the mill.
Harvest is carried out between families and neighbors, since most families’ production is small and outside labor is scarce.
San Lucas Zoquiapam is lushly forested with a dense fog layer. The producers of the area take great care of the forest and have prohibited the hunting of wild animals such as armadillos, wild boars, lowland bales, and others.
San Lucas Zoquiapam, unlike other towns in Mexico, has a large number of young coffee producers. They view the coffee business favorably and want to continue their ancestral craft using techniques passed down over many generations and cultivating the endemic varieties of this area.
Our work in this area started off with the Garcia Carrera family. Their patriarch Cesar Garcia Carrera along with his son Cesar Garcia Morales spent many years seeking a market with better and more competitive prices for him and his family. In 2018, they contacted the Red Fox team in Mexico. That first year our team cupped tons of samples from them in order to offer recommendations for quality improvement. They put in the work and the next year we bought their coffee for the first time of many. Since then we’ve been working together, helping them access better prices and more competitive markets and increasing the amount of coffee we buy from them. The relationship is built on a foundation of trust and traceability.
