José Ramón began coffee farming in the 1970s. Back then, he was working his father’s fields while listening to lessons on the radio before he’d even left school.
Over the six decades since, he’s been the winds blowing a huge change in the Colombian coffee industry – to say the least.
He’s spent his life growing great coffee, genuinely caring about everyone around him and reinvesting what he earns into building an amazing coffee farm, Buenos Aires.
For José Ramón, the people on and around the farm are everything. If you speak about him in the local area, you’ll get an overwhelmingly positive reaction at the mention of his name – he looks after countless locals.
In fact, he and his wife, María Del Rosario Ariza Coy, have been working together for 16 years with this approach.
Everything is equal between the two on the farm, and they’ve reinvested the premium we pay them for their speciality coffee into making the dining and living quarters better for the workers.
What they’ve done in this sense is second to none, and they recently went even further with their former farm manager, Orlando.
Orlando worked up the ranks and was promoted continuously by the couple over a series of years. When he got to the top of the ladder, José Ramón told him it was time to go his own way and loaned him the money, interest free, to buy the farm next to Buenos Aires.
Unsurprisingly, Orlando worked extremely hard, paid José Ramón back and has made the farm a roaring success. Like his mentor, he today operates with worker-first ethics. That seems like truly positive continuity to us!
