Enlightenment

Stiven Hoyos and his six siblings are the new coffee-growing generation of the Hoyos Alvarado family. His father, Don Rodrigo, has been a campesino and a coffee grower for decades, and has now decided to pass the reins to his children.

Rodrigo has spent that time trying to hand on a passion for coffee that in this family stretches back four generations. Things have changed markedly: his first memories of work, as a day labourer on coffee farms some forty years ago, earned him three pesos. With the devaluation of the Colombian peso since, that would not register as a single cent today. Money was not the point, though — those years gave him the idea of building a family farm the household could sustain itself on.

Stiven is one of the youngest children, and at 22 one of the youngest growers in the Monkaaba collective. The group is majority under 35, and it exists partly to argue against a widely held belief in Colombia: that rural life, and coffee farming in particular, is not a viable future for young people. Many of his peers leave for Bogota, or now for the United States.

That never appealed to him. He picked coffee through high school, applied to university, and in the free time while he waited became Rodrigo's main assistant on the farm at Balceros — learning how the coffee was managed, processed and dried. When the entrance exam finally came around he travelled to the city, found it exciting and overwhelming in equal measure, and came back to San Agustin unsure how he felt about it. He did not pass, and was told to sit it again the following year.

To lift his spirits, Rodrigo set aside a part of the farm for Stiven to manage as his own. He planted 800 Red Caturra trees there and, with a great deal of work, brought them to production. That first harvest changed things: the idea of leaving for the city faded, and he committed to carrying the family's coffee growing forward.