Barrie House and the Fair Trade USA Organization partners with the Guaya’b cooperative farms on an important project for the future of coffee growing in Jacaltenango, Guatemala.

Barrie House sponsors productivity and quality project of 2,500 sacks of organic fertilizer to strengthen organic production of all GUAYA’B in Jacaltenango, Guatemala cooperative members.

The GUAYA’B cooperative farms face ongoing challenges fighting rust leaf diseases, coping with increase costs of fertilizers and fungicides, and negotiating construction costs associated to soil conservation measures make it difficult to secure financing and sustain a profitable margin. For every pound of Fair Trade Certified coffee sold, the cooperative earns an additional 20 cents per pound which they have been investing in projects that help build resilience in the face of these challenges. In addition to purchasing Fair Trade coffee from GUAYA’B to support this work, Barrie House is also going a step further to support the people that grow our coffee by sponsoring a specific fertilizer project.

“It’s important and worthwhile investing in cooperative members who produce quality coffee and seek continued sustainability of their product,” says CEO, David Goldstein. “We buy Guaya’b Guatemalan green coffee, roast and sell the coffee directly to customers. This coffee is our highest certified coffee, Organic, Fair Trade and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC). Our sponsorship helps to encourage future production of quality crops from these producers, whom we admire.”
The project means more than fertilizing soil for coffee. It further…

• helps mitigate increasing and repetitive crop ruin from leaf rust diseases.
• enables Guaya’b cooperative to achieve more uniform processing of their coffee to meet organic standards.
• optimizes the use of organic fertilizers and efficient use of synthetic fertilizers to boost yields without unnecessarily boosting Greenhouse Gases (GHG) Emissions.
• encourages practices of composting and mulching residues from processing and pruning to be incorporated as organic matter into the soil, boosting productivity and sequestering carbon in the soil.

Through GUAYA’B’s program of elaborating organic fertilizers, they were able to process and distribute 2,500 quintals per year of quality organic fertilizers made from the coffee processed pulp.