Finding Meaning Through Family in Brazil

In coffee, we talk about family a lot. It is one of those words that gets attached to nearly every farm we visit, to nearly every story we write. So often, in fact, that it risks losing its shape. I am certainly guilty of this myself. But on a recent trip to Brazil to visit our export partner SMC, the word regained meaning. Family kept turning up in distinct ways, not just as a fact of ownership, but as the thing holding the coffee together. In this trip report I want to talk about 3 farms that inspired 3 different definitions of the same word. By the end of the week, I decided to stop trying to pick which one mattered most.

Before I begin, I want to extend a huge thank you to Maria, Yana, Vivian and Felipe of SMC for all the effort they put into hosting us. And a huge thank you to all the producers we visited across the week. SMC’s own hospitality mirrored this notion of family. We were fed, housed, driven, and introduced to these families by people who treated us like an extension of their own circle. Without SMC, and without the structure a cooperative like this provides, stories like Ronaldo’s, Manasses’ and Andreia’s would likely never have reached us at all.

Nova Resende

We arrived at Sítio Divisa late in the afternoon, the sun beginning to set. Nestled on a counter facing slope, this 18 hectare farm owned by Ronaldo Madeiras was one of many that make up the coffee producing region of Nova Resende. Known locally as the “city of coffee,” it is famed for its high altitudes, cool climate and mountainous landscape. Producer plots in the region range between 2 and 20 hectares in size, closer to the smallholder definition associated with Central American cooperatives than farms typically found in Brazil. Before we even stepped out of the vehicle, there was a romance to the place.

The first person we saw was Ronaldo’s 16 year old son, Murilo, driving the tractor across the drying patio, chasing the last of the day’s light as he raked the cherry into neat rows. And then Ronaldo’s 8 year old daughter, Lorena, who Yana from SMC folded into an enormous hug as we stepped into their home. Sítio Divisa is a family farm in the strictest sense. Ronaldo is the second generation to farm this land and the fourth generation of the Madeiras family to grow coffee. His 2 brothers own their own land on neighbouring plots, with the 3 of them sharing a single drying patio. The family only started supplying speciality lots through SMC in 2017 and entered the Cup of Excellence the year after. Today, all the brothers consistently score well in the SMC Especialíssimo competition and Ronaldo’s brother Marcelo won the Natural category in 2022.

Ronaldo’s father was also waiting at the farm to greet us. Over a coffee and a cachaça chaser, he told us that in the old days, he would spend up to 3 hours on a bus just to deliver coffee samples to a buyer who might not even want them. Now, he said, the buyers come to him. It may seem a small sentence, but it symbolises the shift in the relationship between the producers of Nova Resende and the specialty market.

As well as being a family farm in the strictest sense, Sítio Divisa is also just one component of the larger family of Nova Resende. Back in 2021, Philip Searle of DRWakefield visited a neighbouring smallholder in the region and was equally inspired by the coffee being produced. The high scoring microlots were one thing, but he also wanted to showcase the coffee of this region at larger volumes, whilst maintaining a level of traceability to ensure the producers still got recognition. SMC suggested that we begin sourcing a new blend called Vinte, coffee from 20 different producers in Nova Resende that could showcase the region’s quality at scale. Shared patios, shared knowledge and a shared blend. Vinte has become an extremely special coffee for us here at DRWakefield. In a full circle moment at the end of our visit to Sitio Divisa, Saint Espresso, who have been roasting Vinte for 4 years, presented a bag back to Ronaldo, one of the 20 farmers who produced it.

Sítio Três Barras

Next up is the story of a ‘family’ stretched across the Atlantic. Located near the city of Divinolândia, Sítio Três Barras is a 59-hectare farm owned by Manasses Sempaio Dias. Manasses farms almost entirely alone outside of harvest season. During harvest, a small team of 3 to 5 workers join him.

The farm originally belonged to Manasses’ grandfather, José Caetano Dias, who began cultivating potatoes in the 1940s. His grandfather did try planting coffee in the 1950s alongside the potatoes but gave up after a decade of little success. It was Manasses’ parents who started again in 2001. There is a lovely, slightly improbable family story tucked into that history too. Manasses’ mother, Maria de Carvalho Dias, had a friend in Divinolândia who ran a coffee nursery. When prices fell to historic lows in inflation adjusted terms during the 2001/02 coffee crisis, the value of seedlings at the nursery was all but worthless. The Dias family bought 5,000 coffee plants simply to help her out. The section of the farm where these seedlings were planted still exists today.

However, perhaps the strongest story of family at Sítio Três Barras has little to do with lineage at all. In 2016, severe localised hailstorms struck portions of Brazil’s coffee producing states. These hailstorms devastated Sítio Três Barras, cutting production down to just 80 bags of bica, of which only 40 bags were graded to specialty export standard. Manasses remembers that Coffee by Tate, a roaster across the Atlantic, bought every exportable bag at a premium to the market. This gave him the confidence to keep investing in quality. Manasses holds this relationship in high regard. Inside his house, he proudly showed us a wall covered in framed information cards, one for every Coffee by Tate release featuring Sítio Três Barras coffee over the past decade. It is not so different, in the end, from any other family photo wall. It is just pointed outward, at a specialty roastery that has worked so closely with Manasses over the years.

10 years on, as we were walking around the farm, Manasses unveiled a staked plaque to commemorate this relationship. Joe was only the third person from Coffee by Tate to visit Sitio Tres Barras and was lucky enough to hammer the plaque into place with Manasses’ help.

Canta Galo

Canta Galo, translated as “The Singing Cockerel”, is far larger than either Sítio Divisa or Sítio Três Barras, though no less special. The 400 hectare farm sits between lake Cabo Verde and the mountain range behind, producing a cool microclimate and breathtaking views. The farm was founded in 1968 by José Carlos Silveira. He was, by every account, a restless and dynamic entrepreneur, forever chasing improvement through better management, infrastructure and administration. Andreia Silveria, his daughter, now carries that legacy forward.

A recent study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the International Coffee Organization found that just 13.2% of coffee farms in Brazil are owned by women, despite women making up 70% of the labour force. Andreia was keen to highlight this imbalance, and pointed to Donas do Café, an SMC initiative she is part of that works to change those statistics. Andreia explained that on many visits to neighbouring farms, women describe their own role modestly, as simply “helping here and there,” even when they are the ones responsible for huge parts of the operation. This could be anything from post harvest processing and quality control to the daily decisions that determine what ends up in the cup. However, because ownership so often sits on paper with a male relative, these women can quietly vanish from the story their own coffee tells. Donas do Cafe aims to recognise the women who keep coffee farms running, regardless of whether their names appear on the paperwork.

The passion shown by Andreia for this project is already visible in the next generation. We were greeted at Canta Galo by Ana, Beatriz and Laura, Andreia’s daughter and nieces. All 3 were clearly invested in the future of the farm. For now, Beatriz and Laura have their sights set on international study at university whilst Ana is just beginning secondary school. Even so, it seemed clear from their enthusiasm for coffee that their long term plans were to return to Canta Galo in some capacity and continue growing what Andreia has built. This future for Canta Galo is exactly what Donas do Café, and Andreia herself, are fighting for. Recognition for the women already running these farms is one battle. Keeping their family coming home is the next one. At Canta Galo, that battle already looks won.

By the end of the week, I had 3 new definitions for the word family. A shared patio, a wall of framed cards and a farm built by one generation and now carried by the next. Ronaldo, Manasses and Andreia would each define the word differently, and none of them would be wrong. And of course, these stories do not exist in isolation. SMC is the thread running between them and it is hard to imagine any of these families reaching us without it. Relationships like these are, in many ways, the entire reason DRWakefield exists. And it felt fitting that, just a few weeks later, SMC were able to repay the visit, travelling to see the very roasters that had been in Minas Gerais only weeks before… and they were lucky enough to watch England see off Congo in the last 16 of the World Cup at a beer garden in Brixton. Not quite the rolling hills of Nova Resende, but I suppose this is our own idea of family.