At the far end of town in Concordia, Colombia, a two-hour drive southwest of Medellin, you’ll reach the area known as Casa Grande. The road you’ll find there is only two years old now, and if you drive to its end, the very last house you’ll come upon belongs to 65-year-old Gustavo de Jesús Rodas. You will have arrived at his Buena Vista Farm.

The road you will travel carries incredible significance. Transporting anything to the center of the city used to be done by mule, or on the shoulders of family members and neighbors. A half-mile trek, straight downhill to the city center, and then right back uphill to get home. Now, cars and motorcycles easily transport Gustavo’s coffee to market, along with his crop of corn, cassava beans, plantains, bananas and legumes.

Gustavo’s father, Alejandro Rodas Arango, bought and farmed this land more than seventy years ago. It’s a beautiful and fertile plot, a mile into the sky. The sloping countryside is nestled between mountains and stony ground, with breathtaking views of sunrises and sunsets. Gustavo and his brothers learned to work this land with their father from a very early age. Each of them received a part of the land as an inheritance when Alejandro passed. Eighteen years ago, Gustavo purchased his brothers’ land, and he is now the sole owner-operator of Buena Vista, where he lives with his wife of 32 years, Marleny Valencia, and their children Juan David, Luis Ferney, Leidy Diana, and Maria Alejandra.

Farm work is hard work, and while one of Gustavo’s sons works in the city, the rest of his extended family works on the farm. They are currently two months away from the start of the harvest season at Buena Vista, when Gustavo will augment his work force with neighboring pickers. It’s a big job for a small coffee producer. Gustavo doesn’t employ any advanced technology at Buena Vista, so everything is done by hand. 

Four total acres of Gustavo’s multi-acre farm are planted with Colombian and Castillo varietals. The choice of these varietals is intentional, especially amongst smaller coffee farms, because of their resistance to coffee rust. This small spore starts on the leaves of the tree and can grow to consume 50 to 100 percent of the tree’s leaves. That can mean real damage to a small grower’s coffee yield, so each year Gustavo renews any afflicted trees. And this is where San Francisco Bay Coffee comes into Gustavo’s story.