San Jose community

San Jose is a community the province of Colomi, just 100km northeast of the city of Cochabamba, the region is known for its highly pluvial precipitation, along with other communities in the zone such as maycamonte, San Julian and Pucamayu they conform the region known as Yungas de Cochabamba, because of the similarities with the yungas of La Paz.

This region is mainly known for the cultivation of locoto, a Bolivian Pepper, tomatoes, avocados and potatoes, also the region on the lower points is rich in citric fruits.

Recently, due to the success of Valeriano Callejas, one producer who is cultivating coffee for 8 years now and won on a couple of occasions and is always a top ten finisher on the national auction of coffee producers, a lot of families in the community and the other neighbor communities, began to implement coffee to their crops, Juan Calani, a close relative of Valeriano won the national auction on 2021 with their 2nd harvest, 90% of the families in San Jose 2022 is going to be their 2nd harvest, the problem is that every family, since coffee production is extremely new to the region, has no more that a couple of ha. of coffee plants, with the majority having less that 1ha. This makes it very difficult to sell their coffee, plus there is no mill in Cochabamba, and going to la paz to process their coffee
results is difficult in terms of time and costs.

Because of the potential of the zone though, we decided to finance the post harvest training program, with the goal to standardize several procedures in order to have a similar output and group the coffees with similar characteristics and same growing conditions in order to make it easier to commercialize their coffee as a whole.

This is the first time we will be working with this region and for this project we selected 25 families with very similar conditions, together they make around 15 Ha. of coffee plantations.