Liquid Love

Marleny and her husband, Augusto Ortega, are lifelong coffee producers, founding members of the Monkaaba group, and pillars of the San Agustin growing community. Their leadership has been key in encouraging other producers to work with Semilla and to invest in long-term relationships that give growers autonomy in a buying system that tends to extract wealth while keeping them in the dark.

Marleny met Augusto in 1990, when she was 19. She had grown up one of nine siblings raised by a single mother, with little choice but to move to Bogota looking for work; meeting Augusto led her back towards coffee. The two worked side by side on the farm, but for at least ten years they had no option but to sell into the local market.

In the early 2000s they became involved with the Los Naranjos grower group in its earliest stages, which finally let them sell at a differential price — though typically only as part of a blend. It wasn't until 2015 that Marleny sold a micro lot internationally under her own name, and even then she felt separated from her clients, with no sense of how the coffee was received or whether she could count on them the following year.

They kept investing anyway, replacing older, lower-quality varieties with plants that had more potential — this Gesha among them. Their commitment shows in their refusal to sell a single seed elsewhere: we've now bought their entire harvest two years running, something they had never managed despite decades of connection to the specialty market.