Visit Luis Adauto, Brazilian Coffee Producer of the Year in 2007, and he may just start digging. Besides being one of the pioneers of Fair-trade coffee in Brazil, Luis Adauto and his family also produce award-winning coffee.   He is proud that wherever he digs on his farm, you find life. The worms are in some ways symbolic to him, the visual representation of the complex micro-biotic life in his organic soil, life that he is convinced ultimately leads to the wonderful melon and red fruit flavors found in his coffee.  Adauto views himself ultimately not as a coffee producer, but rather as a shepherd of this life; his objective to foster it and it in turn will produce great coffee. Though I have never been, I imagine my trip to Luis Adauto’s farm is not all to different than a visit to Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms.

We highlight the soil in this blog post, but the diverse flora and fauna found throughout is farm is remarkable.  Like many other great artisan coffee farms there is a forest preserve above his property, adding to the diversity and slowly releasing water throughout the year to serve as a natural irrigation system. Perhaps these factors are neither sufficient nor necessary to guarantee high quality, but it seems wherever I find this diversity,  I find great coffee.