Today I’m spending the night in what is apparently the Roswell of Brazil. After dinner we went out to see the UFO and the aliens. Nobody was abducted.
Yesterday was the first farm visit of the trip. We drove to Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza near Mococa and this was completely different from anything that I saw on my previous trip to Brazil. Organic, transitioning to fully shade grown, wonderful biodiversity. Later I’ll post the obligatory bird photo for the trip and it will be from this farm. Economically they’ve diversified operations to not depend so much on the coffee so only 25% of the land is in coffee. That coffee area has some other crops as well such as banana, but the rest of the land is split equally among sugar cane, pasture (cows), and forest reserves. This fifth generation family farm is doing a lot of cool projects and research. I would have liked to spend more time here learning about the various things being done on this farm, but I can say the same for other places I’ve visited so far and expect that this will be a common desire for many of the stops during this trip. So far it’s been a diverse selection.
Today we visited a couple more places. I need to wrap things up for tonight because the outlets at the hotel I’m staying at today does not fit my plugs (and they’re recessed so even if I had brought my adapter I do not believe it would have fit) and I’m running out of power. In the morning we went to Monte Allegre Coffees and in the afternoon we went to Fazenda Capoeira. Both of these places had gifts for us, and at the latter there was a small media circus covering the visit so maybe you’ll see me on Brazilian television.
The weather has been unseasonable lately. Normally this time of year in Brazil the skies are clear and the air is dry. Now the sky looks like this:
That means a lot of coffee that would be getting dried on patios isn’t and that’s going to have a negative influence on the quality of the coffees. Fortunately, there are some coffees that were done with this before the clouds and rain arrived and I’ve cupped some very nice coffees so far.
