2018 Seeds Fund Recipient
Toldopamba is a family business of three generations producing specialty coffee in Nariño, Colombia. The community of Santafé has been producing coffee since the 1960’s and, until recently, selling their coffees for minimum market prices to traders in a nearby town. That all changed in 2016 through the work of Carlos Torres Burbano and Angela Patiño Findlay. Carlos is the son of coffee producers Angela is trained in coffee quality assessment. Together, they provide on-the-ground technical assistance and in-the-moment tasting and quality feedback to farmers, helping them improve their coffees and ultimately garner high premiums.
Carlos and his mother, Teresa Burbano de Torres, used a Seeds grant to build a facility on their farm to make compost via vermiculture and produce biofertilizers. By proving the efficacy of these projects on their own coffee farm, they want to inspire their neighbors and other farmers to use more organic fertilizers as well.
Seeds Program
Counter Culture Coffee collects $0.01 from every pound of coffee sold to fund our Seeds program. Annually, $1 per pound of our winter coffee blend, Iridescent, goes to further increase our contribution. Seeds offers financial grants to producers and producer organizations we work with to implement sustainability projects they identify as beneficial. To date, we’ve allocated over $280,000 to Seeds projects.