Ozone Producer Story: The Martinez Family (Finca Argentina, El Salvador)

Finca Argentina is a beautiful farm surrounded by natural hot springs in the Apaneca-Ilamtepec mountain range. Finca Argentina is separated into 7 areas or 'tablons', these are approximately 6 hectares in size each, but some are smaller due to their location and other landscape characteristics:

The highest tablon is San Jorge at 1,300-1,360 masl. This is 2 hectares in size and was replanted with Yellow Pacamara 4 years ago.
Fincona 2 is the most productive tablon at a size of 8 hectares, sitting at between 1,250-1,300 masl.
Fincona 1 is 4 hectares, sat at 1,200-1,250 masl. The coffee plants here are intercropped with macadamia nut trees which were planted in 2020.
Guachipelin is 6 hectares in size, and in 2016 was replanted with H1, Yellow Bourbon, Icatu and a small amount of Kenya/SL-28.
Los Mangos (where this coffee is from), also 6 hectares, is the location of a volcanic vent with boiling mud areas!
Piletas is 6 hectares large and is also being replanted in 2020. This is the lowest area of the farm at about 1,150 to 1,200 masl.
4 Manzanas (3 hectares in size) were replanted in 2018 with Portillo (a Bourbon hybrid).

Our friend Alejandro “Ale” Martinez owns the farm with his father Mauricio, who inherited the land and several coffee farms from his own father in 2008. Mauricio moved to Canada at the start of 2024, where his son Alejandro has been living for a while now. Mauricio is still involved in overseeing the farm remotely, though he relies on his farm manager and the team on site to do a good job and to keep him up to date. His daughter, Beatrix, has not been involved in coffee previously but she’s now working to become involved a little bit to help the family business. Although he’s living in the Canada, Mauricio is still visiting El Salvador regularly to check in on things. Processing of the coffee is still done at the Los Ausoles dry mill, who have a very good relationship with Mauricio and have shown good consistency and reliability for us as buyers.

The Martinez family employ 50 people during the harvest and 30 the rest of the year. They contribute labour and materials to improve infrastructure in their community’s towns, and grow 25 kg of corn annually for each person. They’re also implementing more ecological management: using compost and other organic products to minimise environmental impact, and intercropping beans to enrich soil. Their work has improved the land’s biodiversity and cup quality, and the future for Finca Argentina is looking very bright!

We have been buying from Finca Argentina since 2008 and have seen a lot of changes and developments at the farm level over that time. Heading into the 2024 season, El Salvador has been hit hard by the wider labour shortage impacting other Central American countries. Labour shortages have been a concern in the coffee industry worldwide for decades, but shortfalls in Central America in recent years have become particularly acute due to large numbers of people from coffee producing regions migrating to cities and to the United States seeking more job opportunities and higher wages. Luckily, most of the farms we source from in El Salvador are currently managing well but they are having to consider more ways to retain necessary numbers of staff during harvest season and steps to make working with them more attractive. In recent years the overall safety of El Salvador has improved, with reduced gang activity.

Throughout the rest of the growing season at Finca Argentina, individual workers are given a lot of responsibility over pruning and managing trees. On many farms, pruning would be quite regimented (e.g. every other tree gets a skeleton prune in this section) whereas Finca Argentina are leaving these decisions much more up to the knowledge of the staff, deciding on a plant by plant basis what kind of pruning is needed when they work through an area. It is easy to ruin coffee production on trees if you don’t make the right pruning choices, so this shows a lot of trust and is only possible when they retain and develop their workers’ skills long term.

Volume of coffee production this year is good, although anomalies in local weather are causing flowering to spread over a longer period. This means more of this year’s crop than usual is likely to be lost to under-developed or dried out coffee cherries on the trees when harvest season arrives. The main issue affecting plant stock at Finca Argentina this year is Anthracnose, a fungal disease causing die-back of leaves and branch tips. The staff are treating this via pruning and applying fungicide treatments. A new addition to the farm in 2023 was the planting of Mundo Novo trees. This Bourbon x Typica variety has commercial importance in Brazil and other South American countries but is rarely used in Central America. The plants are high yielding and produce good cup quality despite high susceptibility to leaf rust, pests, and fungus. The first harvest from these trees will be seen in 3 years.

Farm Information