About coffee plantations we partner with

About our coffee beans

At Bud's beans and Beanroasters, a main goal for us was to be able to make great coffee without slave labour or horrendous working conditions. Making specialty coffee gives us this possibility as we can choose directly which farms to work with. We import our beans directly from source and can trace the beans to the farms and know the farms themselves. While not all the farms we work with can afford the international trade labels known as Free-Trade and ECO. All our farms live up to those principles if not surpass them. 

One common sustainability program that many of our farms use is a framework called AtSource+ which is a very unique program brought forth by 

 

Some information about Atsource+ can be found here:

ATSOURCE INFINITY IN ACTION On a tropical mountainside of the Frailesca region in Mexico, farmers are planting new coffee saplings and forest trees. Improving Economic Opportunity Technical support, including pest and disease management, nutrient recommendations, provision of improved seedling varieties, and agroforestry practices, will be delivered up to 1,400 farmers, equipping them with the right resources and skills to increase their productivity and incomes. Supporting Thriving Coffee Communities Regenerating Coffee Ecosystems Nutritional deficiencies are common in many remote rural communities, which prompted further investigation by Olam in collaboration with Chiapas University of Sciences and Arts (UNICACh). By supporting farmers to enjoy a profitable and sustainable coffee business, we remove the incentive to encroach into protected forest to increase their cultivation area. Instead, farmers are engaged with good environmental stewardship.

They are part of an AtSource ∞ reforestation project with the Alliance for Sustainable Landscapes and Markets, in partnership with USAID Mexico and Rainforest Alliance. This multi-stakeholder project is working to conserve biodiversity and provide sustainable livelihoods in the biological corridor of Chiapas, one of Mexico’s key coffee growing states.

The livelihoods of 100,000 families in this area depend on coffee. This makes the beautiful, heavily forested El Triunfo and La Sepultura biosphere reserves vulnerable to deforestation and degradation as the impact of climate change on productivity drives farmers higher up the mountain to expand their farmland. The result is uncontrolled fires becoming more frequent, with a serious threat to biodiversity, productive landscapes and the local population’s safety. Olam has worked alongside impoverished farmers from Chiapas for over seven years, helping them implement sustainable agricultural practices and tackle low productivity that still plagues old coffee farms where the dreaded “coffee rust” has taken hold. In 2018, this multi-stakeholder landscape initiative was launched to build on and scale up these efforts over four years.

OUR OBJECTIVES AtSource was selected as a finalist in the 2021 SCA Sustainability Awards.