[73] Colombia - Maria Magdalena Lora [CROP 24/25 ARCHIVE]

Maria Magdalena Lora operates La Maria farm in Bajo San Jose, Pital, managing a 2.5-hectare property that exemplifies the smallholder family farm model prevalent throughout Colombia. As a first-generation coffee farmer, Maria represents a growing segment of producers who have entered speciality coffee to capture higher value from limited land holdings. 

With one permanent worker and seven seasonal harvesters, her operation demonstrates how small farms can optimize labour efficiency while maintaining quality focus. Her membership in the Coocentral co-op connects her to a broader network where the cooperative serves as a crucial intermediary between individual producers and specialty importers like Nordic Approach; facilitating access to international markets that would otherwise remain beyond reach for small-scale farmers. 

This cooperative structure enables Maria to benefit from collective bargaining power, shared processing resources, and direct relationships with importers who value traceability and quality over volume. The current coffee market conditions, with C prices reaching historic highs above four dollars per pound (and maintaining 350c/lb over the last few months) —more than triple the long-term average—make her farm's 12500 trees significantly more profitable than in previous years. However, it's Maria's investment in speciality processing that truly differentiates her coffee in the marketplace, allowing her to command quality premiums that justify the intensive labour and precise timing required for such small-scale production. 

Maria's extended fementation natural processing represents a growing trend in Colombian specialty coffee, where producers increasingly use innovative fermentation techniques to enhance cup quality and add value to their production. The process involves fermenting whole cherries for extended periods before drying, allowing wild yeast and bacteria to develop complex flavour compounds via fermentation that create a complex final cup character. This approach transforms the inherent qualities of the Castillo variety, building upon its natural sweet but simple character to develop deeper complexity and wine-like attributes - a bit of funk, if you will. Such processing methods have become particularly valuable for "improved" varieties like Castillo and Cenicafe, which have agronomic benefits to their growth but tend to have a lower average cup quality than some of the more prized varieties out there.