Agroforestry Coffee: The Café dos Contos Case, Part III

The PRETATERRA and Café dos Contos project

Paulo de Araújo, one of the partners and founders of the organic agroforestry coffee brand Café dos Contos, says it was an easy choice to call PRETATERRA to help them at the start of the project:

"Both Valter and Paula are the professionals with the most hands-on agroforestry experience, with a lot of scientific background on their production systems. They bring great credibility and transparency to farmers looking for answers, offering proposals that are very well grounded both scientifically and technically."

Thank you for your trust, Paulo! After our partnership began in 2018, two agroforestry plots were established within the coffee monoculture: one designed by PRETATERRA and the second a replica of it, with some different species. In the first, as we told in the first post about the project's story, banana, macadamia, inga and Australian cedar were planted.

In the second, more recent plot, Paulo and Mariana decided to combine the coffee with citrus, including Sicilian, Tahiti and Rangpur lime and Maingate tangerines. Coffee processing, that is, cleaning, pulping, grinding and roasting, is done with outside partners.

Sales happen through an e-commerce platform for small producers called Faz a Feira, and Paulo and Mariana also sell on social media, mainly on the Instagram account @cafedoscontos. Be sure to check it out and order coffee from the latest harvest!

Room to expand the system

The Monte Sião property still has plenty of room, with up to seven hectares available for future regenerative plantings. With room to grow, the partners want to join forces with individual farmers in the region who are interested in transitioning their coffee to more regenerative production. Bringing these farmers together, each with local experience to add to the group, even informally, will allow a very enriching exchange of knowledge.

PRETATERRA's agroforestry designs are planned to be modular, elastic, adaptable and replicable. That is why they can be adjusted to different management and market demands within the same landscape. We work with the concept of the functional niche, which takes ecological, agricultural and form characteristics, among others, into account when placing species in space and time.

This is still the beginning of a long and beautiful journey. Many coffee harvests will bloom, the macadamias will be harvested, the citrus will ripen and the regeneration of the property will keep expanding. It will become an agroforestry tale that inspires others.

Would you like to convert your production system using regenerative agriculture techniques, or learn everything about agroforestry? Then Pioneer, the first course of PRETATERRA Academy, is for you. Read all about it on our website, watch a free lesson and enroll with a discount.