Carmo Estate leads and supports several programs aiming to improve the quality of life of people who work in the farm and/or live in its surroundings. Improving healthcare, education, housing and income is the main goal of our initiatives. A resident doctor provides permanent and attentive health care to the workers, and the farm provides financial and logistic support to activities in the local government-led school. Training is permanent in areas as diverse as coffee technology, sanitation and environmental preservation. Through our housing program, workers are subsidised to build or renew their houses.

The farm also runs an innovative land-sharing program, in which workers and their relatives who are interested in growing their own coffee can do so inside the farm, through long-term land rental contracts with symbolic prices. This program, started around 15 years ago, has been very successful and today there are more than 80 families growing coffee inside the boundaries of Carmo Estate.

The Mantiqueira Region is located in the Atlantic Forest biome, one of the most biodiverse regions in Brazil and in the world. At Carmo Estate we are committed to conserve and restore natural ecosystems and ecological processes, not only due to the intrinsic value of nature, but also because we understand that a healthy environment is crucial for sustaining agricultural production.

About 45% of the area of the farm is covered with native forests. In the last decades, both the area and the ecological integrity of the forests in the farm have increased thanks to initiatives such as fencing of remaining forest fragments, implementation of ecological corridors, and active forest restoration. In 2003, through a partnership with the NGO SOS Mata Atlântica, we restored an area of 2.5 ha through the planting of 5,000 seedlings of native trees.

At Carmo Estate we abide to the highest environmental standards in all steps of our production system. We follow strictly the rigorous environmental guidelines of UTZ certification, and we are constantly seeking for strategies to reduce our environmental footprint by applying activities such as:

• recycling water in our wet mill facilities;
• the use of coffee residues (coffee husks and peels) as organic fertilizer in our plantations;
• the application of chicken manure as organic fertilizer, reducing the need to apply chemical fertilizer.