My name is Walker, and I am the founder of Farmers Origin. My connection to coffee and the people who grow it began in 2004, when my family decided moved to a small coffee farm in the San Luis valley of Monteverde, Costa Rica. I quickly learned that coffee farming is very time consuming, requires delicacy and skill, and is hard on the back. While I didn’t last long in the fields, all of our neighbors are coffee farmers by profession, and many of the kids at the small school I attended were the children and grandchildren of coffee farmers. I got to know many of them well, and began to understand the hardship that many coffee farmers endure.
While some of the farmers in tourism heavy areas have been able to make more money by selling to tourists, the average coffee farmer has only one choice: work hard and sell at the commodity price. Contrast this with the executive chairman of Blue Bottle coffee, who just recently sold the most expensive house in San Francisco for $21.8 million. There is something wrong here.
People have asked me, what is the difference between coffee and other commodities? Aren’t commodities usually cheap compared to the final product? Coffee is different. Steel, coal, wheat, and oil producers are usually large businesses with government support that have political and market power; coffee, on the other hand, comes from one source: small coffee farmers who have none of these advantages. And while oil, steel, etc require capital intensive processes to turn them into the finished products that we use, coffee farmers do a lot of the processing themselves. All that happens at the end of the supply chain is roasting, packaging, and branding, along with a sale price that is 10 times higher than the price the farmer got paid.
I have had the immense privilege of knowing these people, and of being fortunate enough to attend college in the U.S. I want to bridge the gap between the farmers who work so hard and receive so little for their coffee, and people in the U.S. and elsewhere who enjoy coffee and can appreciate the work that they do.
It takes patience to buy coffee directly from the farmers who grow it, and I know for many using Farmers Origin and waiting a week for coffee may be too much of an inconvenience. I want to change the coffee industry, eliminate its inequality, and help farmers take part in the true value of one of the most valuable commodities on earth. Farmers Origin may not be the answer to this greater problem in its current form, but I will continue working with you and with farmers until we find a solution that benefits everyone. If you have any suggestions or would like to speak about Farmers Origin, do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you for supporting Farmers Origin.
Sincerely,
Walker