Green Bean Feature
Building sustainable relationships First Crop Coffee talks about the importance of paying producers fairly and maintaining an open dialogue with the farmers it supports, and the roasters it partners with.
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irst Crop Coffee was founded by Tony Strickett and Celina Lazarus to support coffee growing communities and provide roasters with a visible supply chain and connection to their growers. “Celina and I started First Crop Coffee because we wanted to do what everyone says they do, which is to help farmers,” Tony says. “We wanted to do something that wasn’t about Celina and I, that wasn’t about First Crop Coffee, but was about us finding producers and roasters to work with who value an equitable trade. “We want producers to increase their yield because the more that they produce, the more money they can
Celina Lazarus, Co-owner of First Crop Coffee, has partnered with Sonia Castenada since 2014.
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make. So we don’t buy coffee based off the C market price, we buy coffee based on what the producers dictate to us is profitable for them.” Tony says this model has been successful for many of the farmers the green bean importer works with, particularly Sonia Castenada, owner of Himalaya farms in the Ahuachapán region of El Salvador. Sonia, who has worked with First Crop Coffee since 2014, uses organic farming practises. She believes this keeps the flavour of the coffee pure and honours her family’s 155-year tradition of coffee farming with the five farms she operates. “I’m very proud of my family’s heritage and success in the Cup of
Excellence competitions. To me, honouring my family heritage and legacy is very valuable, and I plan to leave the farms to my daughters,” says Sonia. The El Salvadorian farmer insists on growing only 100 per cent Bourbon varietal, despite the crop being highly susceptible to leaf rust fungus, which attacks the leaves of the plant. For Sonia, leaf rust has been one of the biggest challenges she faced over the past couple of years during the coffeeharvesting season. “It affected us drastically in our production. We lost 80 per cent of our plants and are still recovering from it as we do not have the resources to grow new plants in order to replace the ones taken by the leaf rust,” Sonia says. Tony adds that El Salvador coffee used to be really popular in Australia, but when the leaf rust hit it decreased the volume of coffee available and pushed the price up. “Consequently, a lot of people who bought from El Salvador stopped buying the coffee because they thought, ‘it’s too expensive, we’ll just buy from somewhere else’,” Tony says. First Crop didn’t. It purchased the entire Himalaya harvest and paid a premium price to help relieve its financial pressures. “We ended up getting Sonia about US$2 per kilogram more for her coffee, which is a significant amount,” Tony says. As per First Crop’s standard buying practice, this was a price dictated by Sonia as to what is profitable for her. Since 2019, the farm has been able to produce a steady harvest. Historically, Sonia’s farm has only produced washed coffees, which is the same method her father used, but in 2020, she attempted her first natural processed coffees. “When the leaf rust occurred, we
