COSTA RICA - ARLEEN & MARIA JIMENEZ| Honey | Bean Voyage

The sisters, Meli and Maria at La Angostura joined forces with their dad 7 years ago to help grow the family’s business.

As one of the first producers to start a mill in the region, Don Mario, father of Arleen and Maria, established Beneficio La Angostura. He believed in coffee’s power to lift his family economically.

The sisters then joined a few years ago to help their family combat the challenges that they were facing with the farming business back then - low market prices, continually growing costs of production, and lack of support from the local coffee industry. Arleen says that she has noticed that her dad was very stretched - as a producer, miller, and also expected to network, market, and sell their product to sustain the business.

Maria and Arleen shared with us that one of the biggest challenges for them is to establish long term relationships and predict how much they can sell to whom, each year.

Amidst the challenges, they are two of the most enthusiastic participants in Bean Voyage's training sessions and always come with alot of curiosity and questions.

Maria tells us that while she has been running the mill with her sister with the support of her dad who has been a lifelong producer, it is important that she also gets second/third opinion on their practices. “It’s not that I don’t trust my dad (laughs), I just think there’s a value in continuously learning and updating your knowledge,” says Maria.

These two girls with lots of innovative ideas and energy are ready to take their farm and mill to another level and we are so excited to be working with them.

Bean Voyage

Bean Voyage is a feminist, non-profit organization working with women coffee producers with the objective of eradicating gender gap in farming communities. Falcon works with Bean Voyage in Costa Rica where they are supporting 120 smallholder women farmers. They have created women-only discussion groups to strengthen the women producers’ confidence and create a safe space for them to share their experience and support each other. They have created communities like this in many areas in Costa Rica. They also do in person and digital training involving higher level of technology to track progress and test the farmers on their knowledge. A huge part of the curriculum is focused on preserving biodiversity and the environment in general to tackle climate change and to produce more in adequation with the endemic ecosystems. Each farmer receives a minimum of 80 hours of training on 5 modules - farm finance, production, processing, quality analysis and gender/community. Bean Voyage also work on finding better markets for the micro lots produced with sustainable partners and fair prices paid. And this is how we started this partnership. On average, smallholder farming families see a 300% increase in farm income from farm-related activities after joining Bean Voyage this due to a better quality of the coffees but also better markets chains for the products.

If you want to know more about their program, please visit Bean Voyage’s website: https://www.beanvoyage.org