Green Bean Feature
Education matters
Through Educare Coffee, Southland Merchants is providing smallscale Brazilian producers with technical knowledge and information to help improve their farming practices and business decisions.
Educare Coffee is empowering producers through education on the wider industry and their role in it.
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raceability has become important to many coffee roasters, sharing the stories of their coffee and how it travelled from farm to cup, but rarely are small-scale coffee producers provided with the same view of the supply chain. Coffee trader Southland Merchants is looking to change that with the Educare Coffee project. Partnering with Brazilian non-profit Sebrae, Educare Coffee is empowering producers through education on the wider industry and their role in it. “Many farmers don’t understand the quality of their coffee and have to go off what they hear or are told by others. They’re also not involved in the process after they drop off their cherries at the mill, which limits their ability to learn and gain that experience,” says Nadia Moreira, Co-founder of Southland Merchants. “With COVID-19, droughts, and frost hitting their coffee farms in 2021, it’s been a challenging year for many Brazilian producers. We decided the best way to support them was with education,
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not just on production best practices and post-harvest processing, but on dealing with the international market and making the best business decisions.” Nadia and Andre Selga founded Southland Merchants in 2017, connecting Australia with some of the finest coffees from Brazil. The trader works with many small-scale producers, whom Andre says can have difficulty accessing formal training or education. “One of the main struggles for small farmers is how they can progress or improve the activities they’ve been doing for quite a while. It’s a family business for many producers, who haven’t had formal training or education in farming development,” Andre explains. “Through Educare Coffee, we’re making it possible for them to access technical, science-based knowledge so they can do things in a different way and see their farmers progress.” Sebrae is a private non-profit entity funded by the Brazilian government with the mission of promoting the sustainable and competitive development of small businesses in the country. For several
decades, Sebrae has offered programs to assist coffee producers, currently running 34 different groups across the country with more than 500 farms involved, covering over 50,000 hectares of coffee plantations. However, due to the significant financial investment required to take part in the program, Andre says it was harder for smaller producers than medium-to-large coffee farmers to join in the training. Through Educare Coffee, Southland Merchants and its Australian roasting partners cover 80 per cent of the costs to make the service accessible. “The program requires a big longterm commitment and a lot of work and data collection, so Sebrae recommended we not cover 100 per cent of the funding. That way, farmers still put a little skin in the game, so they are motivated to make the most out of it,” Andre says. “It’s a long-term program and we don’t expect to see results straight away, but having a coffee merchant like us involved, as well as our roasting partners like B3 Coffee Roasters and Extraction Artisan Coffee, reassures them that there will be a market for their improved quality. That being said, there’s no contract or promise that they have to sell their coffee to us, they’re still free to work with any coffee buyer they wish and we’re just committed to being their best option.” Educare Coffee launched in June 2021 with a pilot group of 14 women in the Mantiqueira de Minas in the south of Minas Gerais, a region not associated with large-scale coffee production. An agronomist specialising in coffee works with the farmers to gather and analyse data and compare this to past months to provide more information for better decision making. “Every month they go on the farm, and check the harvests, how the plants are going, what they need, and what they don’t. When it comes to post-harvest, they follow how they are processing and what they need to change,” Nadia says. “This technical knowledge is something these producers haven’t had
