At the beginning of 2022 we had the opportunity to meet amazing coffee producers in the region of Cauca and they expressed the difficulties they were having producing their coffees due to climate change albeit the rising prices. It was still not enough for them since their production lowered as well.

After that meeting, we put up a plan that would benefit both parties. We started out by buying small batches of coffee cherries from them and processing it at our farm, relieving them from the post-harvest processes and paying them a bonus for the quality cherries they’d harvested. Our clients cupped those coffees and were amazed; some of them even got to meet those producers and were very happy to be part of this project supplying, roasting and serving it at their cafés.

It turned out to be an amazing new intrapreneurship and in mid 2022 we formally decided to execute this project today known as Fellow’s Farms Program.

Fellows’ farms is an Inmaculada Coffee Farms project inspired and aimed to improve farmers quality of life by helping them to enhance their agronomical and picking practices while combining it with Inmaculada’s know-how and improving their price point; this way they can reach specialty coffees standards. The Fellows’ Program also aims to portrait the producers to the international markets with all the traceability so all of their work and effort can be appreciated. This way, together, we can deliver excellent coffees from different neighboring producers.

We are working with a group of farmers in the Cauca department in the municipalities of Tambo, Piendamó and Caldono. Together they sum around 60 Hectares of Colombian common varieties planted in agroforestry concept with trees and shrubs so they can protect their crops of adverse weather conditions.

Papayo is one of several mysterious coffee varieties that have appeared across Latin America in recent years. The story almost always follows a similar pattern: a farmer observed some coffee plants that looked strange, assumed them to be a mutation of either caturra or bourbon—depending on whether the plants were short or tall—and isolated the coffee during picking, eventually to learn that the cup quality was especially good. Then, years later, it would often be revealed that the variety in question was neither caturra nor bourbon, but often had a recent genetic ancestor in Ethiopia. We've heard this story first of gesha, but then of varieties like chiroso, pink bourbon, ají bourbon, catiope, mejorado, and wush wush (though there is legitimate reason for skepticism in certain cases).

Whatever the case, papayo was discovered in the southwestern department of Huila, Colombia, near the town of Acevedo. The plants are tall, like bourbon, and very productive, with clusters of oblong fruit that resemble tiny papayas.