Danilo has started in the coffee farming as a coffee picker, working for a producer who was a friend of his family. His father was already producing strawberries and vegetables when he decided to undertake his own crop of coffee. Today, Danilo has great memories but at the age of sixteen, he didn’t like this ideia, because he would have to cope with the cold and wet weather early in the morning. Laughing, Danilo reports that his father got another job and left the arduous task of taking care of the coffee crops to him, his mother and his sister.
They went through enormous hardships, back in the days when depulping cherries was not common. At that time they didn’t have many coffee trees and they used to strip all of them at the beginning of the process. But since they’ve started developing a more careful work with coffee, they realised this could provide them a much better chance of life quality improvements. “We would be able to pay all the farming expenses, and still have enough to buy a car” – Remembers Danilo with joy.
At Dones farm there are three to four blossoms per harvest, which happens in november, january and march. They have manual selective picking, when they separate the batches by varietals and plots. The coffee goes through the hulling process, which is done with great care, so that the coffee beans don’t lose quality. The drying process happens slowly by thin layers to be gentle and guarantee the ideal humidity in the final product.