Our farms
Everything started more than one hundred years ago, when our grandparents began to write our family’s story at Caxambu and Aracaçu Estates. Among eight offsprings, our mother Ivone received as inheritance the Caxambu Farm. She was already married with our father Francisco José, who was a sugar cane manufecturer’s family’s successor, and both of them initiated their path in the coffee plantation and milk production. In a short period of time they acquired Aracaçu Farm, which by then belonged to one of our mom’s sisters. We’re in five siblings and we grew up learning how to live within the nature and to respect it as the great responsible for our subsistence.
Nowadays we’re the third generation leading the farm’s management process, already with the fifth one starting to be prepared to take over, in the future, the family business that, for many years, has given opportunities to people who built their lives in a dignified, health and fair way, having the coffee as the responsible for all the development.
Caxambu and Aracaçu Estates:
The farms are located in South of Minas Gerais, between the sinuous moutains painting the landscapes of Três Pontas City. A charming region with natural richness that has a prosperous agriculture registered in its history. The Caxambu Farm has its name based on the African ancestry present in Brazil since very early on. The word “Caxambu” means “music box”, referring to the African drums, which was very common back in the days, used by the local tribes as a mean of communication between them. It is a mark that we bring to the present days, in the production of our Afro Honey Coffee, such a great particularity in our portfolium. The Afro Honey is produced using the same technique similar to “stepping in the grapes” when producing wine: with the coffee cherries in a barrel, stepping them with the sound of African drums in the background.
With its 211 hectares, the Caxambu Farm consists in 120 of them in coffee cultivation, more than 60 in legal resourses and permanent preservation areas (APP), 13 in pasture and an area of almost 10 hectares for coffee processing machinery.
The altitude varies from 930 to 1.150 meters and the plantations are like an imense green carpet covering the moutains of Minas Gerais, offering to the world the most desired and seeking coffees, with their unforgettable and unique sensorial nuances. Aracaçu Farm brings up in its name the Indian memories that, until nowadays, leave its traces in our lands. “Aracaçu” means “great tree connecting the sky with the earth”. A link transcending the operational sphere that connects us all with a spiritual dimension which has always strengthen our work.
With 170 hectares in total, Aracaçu Farm holds 155 of these in coffee cultivation and 45 hectares in permanent preservation reserve areas. A true nursery of water springs preserved with respect and responsibility from those who know the principles of the nature and have deep gratitide for having such sacred lands in hands.
Both farms combined form a 380 hectares land complex. It is a green cloak that produces 9.500 bags of coffee annually which attend the demand of the most rigorous markets and consumers in the world, being processed with refinement and engagement.
Sustainability: The Caxambu and Aracaçu Estates aims the present moment, supported by the historical events, looking towards the future. The plantation’s permanent renovation guarantees the quality, productivity and the optimisation of the production processes; essential conditions to the business’s economical sustainability.
Continuous Improvement: Quality is the principle conducting the processes at Caxambu and Aracaçu. To maintain and intensify the final product’s quality an Experimental Field was created, with 93 coffee varieties, coming from prestigious Brazilian institutes of researches and developments in coffee genetics boosting, as well as from recognized farms in the specialty coffees output.
This field allows the early identification of the best varieties to be inserted in the farm’s renewing process where there can be pointed out the quality, productivity and development potential of each plant, the screen rates, adjustment in the farm’s technological pack, diseases resistance, behavior in face of climate adversities, etc.
Environment: We’re a family with agriculture tradition. For us, taking care of the environment is an intrinsic condition to our own lives; we are nature. We were born, grew up and developed from and with it. Our environmental projects are like life projects. Our vocation is to plant and this justify to have kept for more than a century farms that are an advent of native forest and endless woods planted by our own hands; ecological corridors sheltering hundreds of thousands of birds, animals and vegetation.
Our coffee production follows agro-ecological patterns, where the soil’s recovering and maintanance has always been guidings to our technological packs to reach better agricultural practices.
Projects: The farms support important social, environmental and sporting projects. Among those, stand out:
Clean Path Campaign: developed with the city hall’s support and several municipal companies, having as focus to develop an educational work of awareness to the rural and urban population regarding the proper litter disposal.
My Garden Project: an awareness-raising Caxambu and Aracaçu’s internal movement targeting the farms’s residents and employees. The planet is our common house, where we all live in, and is up to each of us to take care of it.
A Day to Plant: annual activity developed inside the Caxambu and Aracaçu Estates, with all the employees’s families, when dozens of kids, along with their parents, plant trees around the farm to extend even more the ecological corridors. These trees gain identity when they’re cared by those who planted them.
Friends of the Nature: community movement when all the farms’s residents and team members go out to collect litter that, even with all the warnings, is left behind along the internal areas.
Health Day: A moment when many exams are done and several educational lectures are taught for the purpose of bringing clarification regarding the physical and mental health cares.
Clean Earth: a project assisting all the residents’s houses in the Caxambu and Aracaçu farms, annually implanting septic sumps and filters of ecological sources.
Leisure Day: there are many sporting activities to be done during free times, to encourage the employees and families to participate in events to enjoy leisure moments.
Coffee with Music: periodic meetings with the team purpose of integrate them into sensorial experiences through coffee, food and nice talk, everything with special songs in the background.
Educational Process: Caxambu and Aracaçu Estates have partnerships with Universities and Federal Institutions, keeping the agricultural practices always active. Many researches are carefully developed during the cultural treat period, as well as in the harvesting one. We constantly have professional training activities throughout courses, lectures and technical meetings.
Innovation: Being the innovation one of the main goals of the farms shows the constant commitment in seeking new practices and new products that can surprise and delight our partners and clients. With a forward-looking portifolium, besides the specialty coffee production in many ways of processing, as the Afro Honey Coffee, Caxambu and Aracaçu farms are implementing a bold holistic project called “Coffee Garden”, developed under the transdisciplinary and systemic perspective, in a mandala architecture style, within the sacred geometric lines. In this project, several exotic coffee varieties and wisdom tradition partake in a garden full of trees, plants and flowers.
Quality Control: Quality of life of all the team members, the good practices and the involvement with all the procedures is what ensure the final result of our product. In the “House of Sensations” we evaluate these results cupping all the coffees, mapping their sensorial profiles and descriptions, which allow us, sistematically, to give a feedback to the teams of post harvesting, crop and administration.
