2006 News From The Farm

-News from the Coffee farm, growing, harvesting and shipping coffee etc. (Dec, Aug, Feb, Jan)
-Heifer Project in Honduras (Sept)
-Contrasting South Dakota and Honduras Farms (July)
-Shade Grown Coffee (June)
-Tips for storing coffee (June)
-News of our March 2006 trip to Honduras (April)

December News

At the same time as holiday decorations appear all around us, the coffee plants on the Velasquez farms are decked out in red and green -- with bright shining green leaves and red coffee berries. It is coffee harvest time! Because coffee is such an important export crop for Honduras, the whole country begins to buzz with the extra activity and income that come at this time of year.

December is probably our busiest month too. (We think we've probably set a record with our Dec. roasting order -- the biggest yet!)

Holiday Flavors
Thanks to the input of many of you, we decided on three extra flavors to offer for the holidays: *Eggnog Cream *Apple Cinnamon Strudel *Chocolate Covered Cherry

If you'd like to order any of these 8 oz bags this month, contact us at coffee@vfamilycoffee.com or 651-587-5356. They sell for $5.50 and are available whole bean or ground while supplies last. Of course, our regular flavors are available too: Almond Amaretto, Carribean Hazelnut, Dutch Chocolate, African Cinnamon, French Vanilla & Irish Cream.

Coffee makes an excellent gift
Let us know too if you'd like to order coffee for any holiday gifts. We can also ship coffee anywhere in the U.S. for you, for only the extra cost of shipping.

Warm Holiday Blessings to You
Guillermo's parents are still with us (probably until January) and we are looking foward to celebrating Christmas with them here in Minnesota for the first time. We'll also have a chance to celebrate with Cathy's family in South Dakota. We hope you too have the opportunity in the coming weeks to enjoy joyful gatherings of family and friends, as well as quiet moments of beauty and peace. Feliz Navidad!

November News

We had a great time at our Open House in October and a great turn out, with nearly 50 people stopping by for waffles, coffee and conversation. Thank you to all of you who took the time to come by. Guillermo's parents were really pleased to meet so many of our great coffee customers! It's a warm memory they'll surely take back with them to Honduras when they return -- probably in early January after the holidays. (They want to see snow at least one more time. They're already getting a taste of the cold!)

New Logo and Label
Many of you who stopped by our Open House got a chance to see a preview of our new logo and label and to provide some input on the design. (It was a tough decision but we decided on the one with the blue border.) We're still using up about 500 of the old labels, but we'll try to make sure you all get at least one bag with the new one so you see what it looks like. Thanks to Jen Clough for the lovely design! We're excited for the new look.

Velasquez Family Coffee featured in fundraisers
Over the past month, our coffee was sold at the Harvest Festival at Adams Spanish Immersion school, at the Bazaar and Art Fair at Prospect Park United Methodist Church and in the on-line auction for Land Stewardship Project. We are also proud to have an ad in the 2007 Blue Sky Guide. It was a busy month!

German Immersion School Coffee Fundraiser
We are pleased to have started a new partnership with Saint Paul's German Immersion school. If you know of a school or group that would like to start a Velasquez Family Coffee fundraiser, please let us know.

September News

Internet Marketing Gurus drinking Velasquez Family Coffee
Thanks to one of Cathy's college friends and long time coffee customer, 12 internet marketing gurus will soon be drinking Velasquez Family Coffee. Natalie Judd is offering a free internet marketing teleconference and she purchased some of our coffee as thank you gifts for the presenters. The free 12 week teleconference starts Thursday, Sept 7th from 7:00-8:00 CST and features experts in topics such as copywriting, podcasting, sales conversion, list building strategies, search engine optimization, public relations, direct marketing and much more. If you are interested in participating in these free teleconferences (we plan to), sign up today here.

VFC coffee customer, Ev Lennon, writes about her visit to Honduras...
"We are the ones responsible for producing the food in your supermarkets. We don't receive benefit for growing coffee. We are trying to achieve the status and recognition we deserve as farmers." - Santiago in Laguna Seca, Honduras.

This reflection barely touches the surface of the issues that challenge small coffee farmers in Honduras. In June, I had the opportunity to visit farms in Honduras with Heifer Project International, a non-profit organization whose goal is to end world hunger and poverty through self-reliance and sustainability. That's a lofty goal but I saw evidence of growing hope (and growing fields!) during my visit.

Honduras is a beautiful country, covered with gorgeous mountains and people who are kind and generous. In our visits to six projects in the countryside, I witnessed the hard lives of workers in a land where 34% are employed by agriculture and over 46% of the country's population live in poor, rural areas. The average annual income is about $500 for each adult Honduran.

In Honduras, record-low coffee prices have had a devastating effect over the past years. Partially because of a global imbalance between supply and demand, the second most widely-traded commodity in the world paid record-low market prices to growers - most of whom are small-scale, already subsistence, farmers. Although the price is starting to climb now, coffee growers are being helped in recovering from the global coffee crisis through projects such as Heifer that seek alternative markets and teach new ways of production, including diversification of crops. In Honduras, Heifer is helping coffee growers learn beekeeping and access bees and hives through a cooperative effort. Hives can be placed in the coffee groves and, with a huge demand for honey in Honduras, farmers have another income to carry them through the dips of the coffee market.

You may know Heifer as the organization that "gives cows to people"! Its work is really more sophisticated and complex than that. If you'd like to hear more about it, please contact me. I'd like to do presentations for any of your groups, churches, and schools. I appreciate this personal opportunity we have to purchase great-tasting coffee from a small family farm in Honduras!

--Ev Lennon, 651-487-1884; evclennon@hotmail.com (for those of you connected with Adams Spanish Immersion, Ev's son Sam is also an Adam's alumnus!)

August News

With all this hot summer weather, our garden is exploding with tomatoes, cucumbers and green peppers. With our short growing season here in the north, the abundance comes quickly and leaves just as fast. Hard to believe we'll be seeing the leaves start to change color next month!

In contrast, growing coffee is a slow venture. Coffee seeds are planted in beds. After 5-6 months of growth, the seedlings are transplanted into terraces beneath the forest canopy. The small coffee bushes need to grow for a full three years before they produce a good harvest of coffee berries. During this time, the coffee farmer must invest in fertilizers (organic in our case) and labor to keep the fields clean, even though it will be years before they see a profit from their crop. A coffee tree can produce well for about 5 years at which time the tree needs to be cut back and the waiting begins again while the tree regrows.

New customers/New delivery routes
Toward our goal of 100 monthly customers by the end of the year, we are pleased to note that we now have 64 montly home delivery or mail order customers. Thanks to folks in the Morningside community of Edina, we now have enough customers to expand our delivery area to the west a bit. We also have had a number of new customers in Maplewood and Roseville, making it possible for us to deliver further to the north too. We were also excited to learn this past week that the Como Zoo and Conservatory gift shop will start carrying Velasquez Family Coffee.

Next step -- the Web!!
Our next focus over the coming months, is to expand our presence on the Internet to increase our mail order sales. We're hoping to be able to offer an on-line shopping cart on our website in the coming months. We'd welcome advice and vendor/product recommendations from those of you who have experience with e-commerce!

And while we're asking for advice - we'd also benefit from some advanced Quickbooks help -- especially with regards to inventory management and enterprise analysis. We'd love any leads you might have for good consultants or even experienced practitioners (perhaps even someone willing to barter for coffee??)

Filter packs for your office or cabin??
We are now pleased to offer Memo's Breakfast Blend conveniently ground and packaged in 2.25 oz filter packs (enough for a pot of coffee), perfect for offices, camping or even just lazy mornings. The filters can be purchased in a case of 42 for $55.00 or a smaller bunch of 10 filters for $15.00. Let us know if you'd like a free sample to try out.

July News

We were just in South Dakota for the wedding of Cathy's cousin and decided while we were out west we would take Guillermo's parents to the Black Hills. Although we did an awful lot of driving, Guillermo's parents really enjoyed seeing the contrasting scenery. First the rolling hills and woods of Minnesota which slowly changed into the prairie and wetlands of western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. And then the Black Hills. They enjoyed being in the mountains again as well as experiencing farming in the prairie.

Landscape Opposites
Farming in western South Dakota and Honduras couldn't be more different. Cathy's uncles farm west of Aberdeen near the Missouri river where the landscape is very sparse -- just about as extreme a contrast from the Honduran coffee farm as you can imagine. Flat open fields and pastures versus steep, forested mountains. Short dry grasses and almost no trees versus lush tropical vegetation. Extreme temperatures (from minus 40 to 100 plus) versus fairly moderate temperatures ranging from only about 60 to 90 in the mountains.

Probably the biggest difference is in precipitation. In that area of South Dakota, a normal year brings about 14 inches of moisture. This year they are suffering a drought and have only had 3 inches of precipitation since January!! Contrast that to the average 200 inches of rainfall that Honduras experiences a year.

But the one thing that is similar between farming here and in Honduras is that it is hard work and risky -- always at the mercy of the weather. So Guillermo's parents and Cathy's family had plenty to talk about (with the help of our translation of course).

June News

We just got back from a lovely weekend camping trip to Forestville State Park just south of Rochester, MN. The weather was perfect and it was good to be out of the city in the quiet forest. The forested rolling landscape of southeast Minnesota reminded us a bit of the mountains of Honduras (although the roads are significantly better here -- summer road construction season does have its benefits).

Spending the weekend surrounded by trees, it seems appropriate to mention again that Velasquez Family coffee is "shade grown." We recently picked up a flyer created by the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory about shade grown coffee which they define simply as "coffee grown under the cover of taller trees."

Velasquez Family Coffee is all grown under shade trees and in many cases even under the original cloud forest canopy. It's amazing to see some of the oldest trees estimated to be over 300 years old! In places where the old growth forest was cut down in the past, our family members have planted new trees. The Como flyer explains the benefits of this kind of coffee farming.

"Shade coffee provides habitat for birds and other plant and animal species. It enriches and conserves soil and in many cases reduces the need for chemicals. [Our family members farm completely without pesticides.] Shade grown coffee contributes to habitat preservation and tropical rainforest conservation in countries where coffee is produced. Approximately 200 species of North American birds winter in Mexico, Central and South America. There the multi-layered vegetation of shade grown coffee plantations provide abundant food and cover. In many areas, shade coffee farms offer the only good habitat amid deforested pastures and single crop plantations."

So that's our salute to trees! We love them and our coffee loves them too.

Storing Coffee
We regularly get asked what is the best way to store coffee. Contrary to popular belief, you should NOT store your coffee in the freezer. Condensation will build up and the coffee may pick up odors. DO store coffee at room temperature, out of direct sunlight, and sealed in the smallest practical container.

For more tips on storing coffee, we found the following website to be very informative: http://www.coffeeam.com/stgrandbrco.html

Decaf from where?
Why is our decaf coffee sometimes marked as Mexican and other times as Brazilian? Because we aren't at a quantity where it makes sense to decaffeinate our own coffee, we actually purchase our decaf coffee from our roaster who sometimes gets it from Brazil and other times from Mexico. But all of the decaf we purchase is fair trade, organic, Swiss water processed and great tasting too.

May News

We had a fun but busy weekend talking to people at the 4th Annual Living Green Expo about our family's coffee. We especially enjoyed chatting with all the great people who stopped by to say Hi. Guillermo's parents, Maximo and Natalia, who are visiting us from Honduras were on hand for a bit and were impressed with the event. They only regretted not being able to speak English with the many friendly people who wanted to greet them.

News from the Coffee Farm
At the same time everything starts blooming here in Minnesota, the coffee plants are flowering too with sweet-smelling white flowers. With the busy coffee harvest completed, the coffee farmers turn their attention to cleaning weeds which is done by hand with a machete, or planting new coffee plants in an outdoor nursery.

This past month, the family has also been preparing the next shipment of coffee for its long journey to Minnesota. (We ship our coffee with a cousin of Guillermo's who sells coffee in Virginia.) The "green" (unroasted) coffee is packaged in 150 pound jute sacks and labeled with "Velasquez Family Coffee." The coffee journey involves a pickup trip to the Honduran port of Puerto Cortez, a ship ride to Miami where it goes through customs and is picked up by a truck and delivered to our roaster, European Roasterie, in Le Center, Minnesota. The coffee waits there until we are ready for Tom their master roaster to roast it as we need it each month.

New Coffee Subscriptions receive 1st bag FREE - please spread the word
To make room for this next shipment which should arrive in Minnesota around August -- and to make it possible to increase our coffee purchases from the family next year, we are eager to continue growing our customer base. We currently have 50 monthly coffee subscriptions (between our home deliveries and our mail order) and we'd like to double this if possible before the end of the year. If you or someone you know is interested in our coffee and the convenience of a monthly subscription (either by home delivery in Minneapolis or St. Paul or by mail anywhere else), please contact us at coffee@vfamilycoffee.com or 651-587-5356. As an incentive to sign up, all new coffee subscriptions receive their first 12 oz bag FREE. Please pass this offer on to others who might be interested.

April News

To Honduras and Back Again
Our trips to Honduras are always fun, but this year was extra special because Cathy's parents, Emil and Penny Eberhart came along for the first time. We spent a few days visiting the Mayan ruins in Copan, enjoyed many lively conversations with Guillermo's large family, hiked in the rain forest and around the coffee farm, and wrapped it all up with a boisterous party (including a marimba band and dancing) to celebrate the baptism of our youngest niece Perla officiated by Emil who (along with Penny) are retired United Methodist Ministers. It was a wonderful coming together of cultures and families.

We didn't leave Honduras too far behind, however, as Guillermo's parents, Maximo and Natalia were able to come back with us here to Minnesota! They've visited us only one other time back in 1998, so we are especially glad they are able to spend a few months with us. We arrived just in time for them to see snow for the very first time in their lives which they found facinating and beautiful. We're thinking of having an open house this summer. We'd like you to have a chance to meet them and we know they'd love to meet our many great coffee customers.

Northfield Coop & CSA farms carrying Velasquez Family Coffee
We're pleased to announce that Just Food Natural Food Grocery in Northfield, Minnesota is now carrying Velasquez Family Coffee. This is especially fun for Cathy as she spent her college days in Northfield attending St. Olaf College.

Speaking of places to buy great local food, this is the time of year to start thinking about joining a Community Supported Agriculture farm (CSA) to get fresh vegetables every week during the summer. We're pleased that two CSAs, BC Gardens and Fresh Earth Farm are again planning to carrying our coffee. For a directory of CSA farms serving the Twin Cities and more information on how these innovative community farms work visit www.landstewardshipproject.org. Finally, we'll once again be setting up our display at the Living Green Expo at the Minnesota State Fair grounds in St. Paul May 6-7. Stop by and say hi if you have a chance to attend.

February News

There is a lot of news to report this month -- the biggest is that we'll be in Honduras visiting the Velasquez family and the coffee farm from March 1-15.

The Coffee Harvest
The word from Guillermo's Dad, Maximo is that the coffee farm has been experiencing some cold weather (well, OK not below freezing or anything, but chilly and rainy nonetheless). As a result the coffee beans are ripening slowly. But don't worry, we expect the sun to come out eventually to turn the green coffee cherries to a sweet red.

We're really looking forward to the chance to visit the beautiful mountain farm again. And we're especially excited this year, because Cathy's parents will be joining us for the first time ever! We are looking forward to sharing this experience with them.

VFC Out and About
We've had several fun opportunities to share about our coffee venture recently. On a Saturday in January, we were invited to speak to a group of volunteers at the Como Conservatory about Guillermo's experience growing up on a coffee farm. Como's new Tropical Rain Forest Exhibit will feature several coffee plants and we're excited they'll be promoting shade grown, fair trade coffee as well. If you haven't been to the Conservatory recently, we highly recommend it.

We also had the pleasure of writing an article about Velasquez Family Coffee for the Land Stewardship Project's latest newsletter that focused on international efforts to promote a healthy food and farming system. Those of you who are already LSP members have probably seen it already. (It's also on the LSP website as a pdf file.) Land Stewardship Project is a great resource if you are looking for more ways beyond coffee to support your values through your food purchases.

We would encourage you to visit www.landstewardshipproject.org for more information and to become a Land Stewardship Project member if you want to learn more and get more involved. Finally, also on the LSP website, you'll find a "podcast" recording of Cathy telling about our last trip to Honduras in the context of a book review of Frances Moore Lappe's book Hope's Edge. If you aren't into this new technology yet (or your kids aren't) you can also read the review in the April/May/June 2005 newsletter.

January News

We hope that 2006 is treating you well! Over the holidays, we enjoyed fun time with our families and a nice break from the usual routine. We hope you did too.

The Coffee Harvest
The coffee harvest is in full swing on the farm. Guillermo's brother Abilio was concerned for a while because he was having trouble finding workers to help pick the red coffee berries. But one day when Guillermo was visiting for his father's birthday he and several family members went for a drive and met a woman walking along side the road taking her sick child to the clinic. She had been walking most of the day and so they stopped and gave her a ride. They learned that she had several older sons who were looking for work. And so several weeks later, Abilio visited the family and hired them and several neighbors too. This is a great relief to the Velasquez coffee farmers as the coffee harvest looks especially good this year. We're looking forward to another great year selling coffee. Thank you for your purchases!