Elías Sanchez Gayoso

On the northern part of Peru, in the province of Jaen, we meet Elias Sanchez and his wife Rosalina Saavedra. They take us to their farm, El Eucalipto where they have their coffee trees, and we also get to meet their sons. Elias has been working in coffee for 24 years now, it all started with commercial coffee and the way he produced was empirical. He had his trees, waited for them to start producing and then process on an empirical nature. Later on, when he joined a project, he learned more about how to produce coffee from planting, cherry picking processing and drying. Five years ago, he took the leap and started producing coffee by seeking out quality for the specialty coffee market. In this past couple of years, he has been thankful of the accompaniment of the PECA technician as the advice given by him has been paramount in the change from an empirical farm to one in which knowledge is the key to producing great quality coffee. He has learned about farm management, processing and better practices during pre-harvest, harvest, and post-harvest which has taken quality up a notch. At the farm he works alongside his wife and sons, where each one helps for the development and improvement of the farm. In these years in specialty coffee, he is proud of being able to achieve better quality and of learning new things to get to the point where he can see that hard work and effort pays off.

His next goals are introducing new varieties to the farm, improve the drying station and more. Until now, quality coffee has brought him good earnings and improve his families’ quality of life, but he wants to continue getting better and learning through trial and error. As a parting message, Elias said “I thank you for your interest in my coffee and hope you keep buying it as it is a clean product, free of agrochemicals. And produced with much effort and care”.