AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — Growing organic food is pretty high up on the list of good things to do for the planet, but one group of coffee growers is taking it a step further.

The Café Justo co-op, which recently earned its international organic certification after operating for its first five years with only Mexican certification, came upon its organic status by what some may call fate and others may call happenstance.

A little history:

Under the now-defunct Instituto Mexicano Café, a governmental agency that supported coffee producers, farmers could get cheap pesticides through a subsidy program, said Adrian Gonzales, Café Justo's director of customer relations and marketing.

After the café shut down in the 1980s, most of the farmers could no longer afford to use pesticides and stopped using them altogether, Gonzales said.

Fast-forward a couple of decades:

The absence of pesticides has produced fields that are now considered clean by the standards of certification organizations, such as Certimex, which certifies organic foods for Mexico, Gonzales said.

Although every country has different rules for organic certification, the general rule is that fields must have been free and clear of pesticides for 10 years or more, Gonzales said.

Having international organic certification will expand the co-op’s business, Gonzales said.

“It’s good for us,” he said.

What makes this organic coffee farm even better for the global environment is the fact that the farmers reuse bits from the plants that do not go into making the beans into a beverage.

Coffee beans are not actually beans, in the traditional sense.

What people call “beans” are actually the seeds of the Arabica or Robusta coffee plants, said Daniel Cifuentes, director of production for Café Justo and a member of the co-op, as translated by Gonzales.

The seeds are extracted from the fruit, or cherry, of the plants and laid to dry in the sun, Cifuentes said.

That’s not the end of the story, though.

Along with shade, fertilizer is essential in getting good growth from the plants, Gonzales said.

Rather than buy all of their fertilizer, the farming families harvest fruit pulp for use in enhancing the growth of the plants, Cifuentes said.

Another product helps out. The second shell of the seed is removed during the roasting process and harvested in a metal pot at the other end of a vacuum set over the roasting drum, Cifuentes said.

The wispy beige husks, along with used coffee grounds from the coffee drank at the production office, are then sent back to Salvador Urbina to be used with the fruit pulp as fertilizer.

As the farmer-owned business model spreads and brings in new farms, so does care for the environment.

"(In Mexico,) there is a new awareness to become environmentally friendly,” Cifuentes said. “There’s a world and we need to take care of it.”





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