Our Commitment

La Reserva de ¡Tierra! aims to make coffee better, from plant to cup, day by day.

La Reserva de ¡Tierra! stands for coffee sustainability projects, started by the company in 2002, which has now become a wider concept managed by Lavazza Foundation (directly or in partnership with suppliers and NGOs) supporting more than 90.000 coffee-growers across 3 continents and 17 countries.

We know that we can do more as we believe better coffee is possible only by gathering the passion and the efforts of all coffee stakeholders.

That is why we created Coffee Defenders: to unset the invisible boundary between farmers and baristas and raise the awareness on the importance of a sustainable approach, from plantation to cup, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN (UN SDGs).

To do so, La Reserva de ¡Tierra! Coffee Defenders directly finances Lavazza Foundation sustainability projects helping farmers to increase the quality of their harvest and supports baristas with dedicated materials and trainings program to improve their professional role and enhance the end consumer coffee experience, in all its forms, moments and meanings.

With Coffee Defenders we aim to spread a sustainability message all-along the coffee value chain, channelling the commitment and raising the awareness on the importance to work all together for a better coffee and a better product every day, from plantation to cup.

In line with SDG 17, we want to favour the interconnection and cooperation between the stakeholder of the coffee value chain, encouraging the share of sustainable practices, innovation and ideas for the whole coffee industry.

Colombia is worldwide known for producing high quality coffee, mainly harvested in the traditional coffee axis located in the centre of the country between the three main mountain ranges, where 60% of Colombians live. Still little know is the tiny coffee area located in the department of Meta and initiated only 50 years ago by 60 immigrants who came from the centre of the country looking for a more prosperous living condition.

Since 2013, this area is part of the government program of “Lands restitution” where empty plots of lands have been reassigned and given back to displaced peasant families.  

Since 2015, Lavazza Foundation together with Carcafé Ltda have started a sustainability projects, rebuilding coffee plantations, investing in infrastructure and implementing training sessions to help farmers to come back to this region and recover the once lost life. 

La Reserva de ¡Tierra! Coffee Defenders in collaboration with Lavazza Foundation, will set 4 communal drying facilities for groups of associated farmers with adjoining farms in order to increase coffee quality and favor cooperation.

Our aim is to reach and support more than 200 farmers of 4 different associations within the Department of Meta in the municipalities of Lejanìas, San Juan de Arama and Mesetas.

By the end of 2020 farmers of the associations should have adopted practices like: deliver their wet parchment at the communal driers on time and have it mixed with that from other members, dry their parchment to obtain a consistent quality avoiding cup defects, sell their dry parchment directly to exporters without the interface of middle men.

In Meta, Coffee Defenders action is impacting SDG 8 through the strengthening of associative work amongst coffee farmers. We want to contribute to solve Meta farmers’ bottleneck of parchment drying by setting up communal drying facilities for groups of associated farmers. SDG 4 is also impacted thanks to specific training sessions to coffee farmers concerning drying processes with specific modules on: humidity standards, quality consistency, milling activities and others.

From January 1st to September 12th of 2019, the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) registered 112,847 fires among the 27 States of Brazil, an increase of 45% compared to the same period of 2018. 

The situation of fires in mega-diverse areas in Brazil is more than worrying and is menacing also the bio-diversity connected to coffee plantation.

One of the involved areas is the region Minas Gerais, a wide area covered by the 41% of Mata Atlântica biome, the 11th State with the highest number of fires and, most of all, the largest coffee producing state in Brazil.

In Lambari, Lavazza Foundation, in partnership with HRNS, is managing since 2010 a sustainability project to support the communities of small-scale coffee farmers, helping them to adopt agricultural techniques to improve coffee quality to facilitate market access and tackle climate change.

La Reserva de ¡Tierra! Coffee Defenders, in collaboration with Lavazza Foundation, will activate a specific reforestation project in Lambari, supporting the plantation of improved coffee varieties and new trees (native and fruit trees) to increase the resilience to climate change effect, directly correlated with productivity and quality decrease.

We chose the best arabica coffee varieties registered in the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, acknowledged for having a greater tolerance to extreme environmental events, such as droughts and high temperatures, in order to ensure the preservation of the local coffee productivity and quality.

Thanks to fruit trees introduction farmers will be able to provide shade to coffee plants and diversify food supply and incomes. The native vegetation will influence the agricultural productivity as well as the biodiversity, limiting erosion and land degradation with soils and riverbanks protection effect, improving soil salinity, water quality and availability, providing habitat for animals.

Our commitment will directly benefit more than 60 producers’ associations and families, already part of the wider sustainability project started in 2010 by Lavazza Foundation and HRNS. Each one will receive 120 trees - 30 fruit trees and 90 trees of native species – together with 2,000 coffee seedlings of improved varieties.    

Our actions in Lambari impacts SGDs 13 and 15 through the plantation of natives and fruit trees to protect natural resources like soil, water and biodiversity, for the benefit of the agroecosystem. New coffee varieties will be planted to increase the resilience to climate change effects, specially related to the decrease of productivity and quality. Through natural regeneration, planting of native species, forest enrichment and the use of exotic fruit species the agroforestry system will be recovered.  In addition thanks to the intercropping activities, that allow coffee farmers to diversify their income, SDGs 2 will also be impacted.