Pete Rogers, our green coffee buyer, travels every year for weeks at a time to hidden coffee outposts where he inspects each farm operation and personally screens harvested beans for the "cream of the crop." A fluent Spanish speaker, Pete finds and maintains our supply of the best green coffee by going to "origin" (the actual farms) to build relationships - rather than simply using coffee brokers or middlemen like other roasters. This enables us to maintain strict measures of quality control right at the source. Over time, his close relationship with each of our farmers has allowed us to set the highest standards in the industry for quality coffee as well as for responsible farming and employment practices. He is so particular about quality that he rejects millions of pounds per year that other roasters buy instead.

As with wine, some farms produce excellent beans and others product very ordinary beans depending on microclimate, soil, elevation, cultivation, harvesting, and processing. Pete is an expert is coffee agriculture, and knows exactly where the most flavorful, quality beans can be found. In fact, Jon Rogers, our president and Pete's father, sometimes calls him a frustrated farmer. Why? Because Pete is really more comfortable in the fresh air, with his boots in the soil and the sun overhead, than he is in his office back at home.

>Community Aid and Sustainable Agriculture
Pete’s passion and concern for struggling coffee communities led us to establish our Community Aid program in 1994. The program has built schools, provided books, improved housing, and established medical clinics in struggling coffee communities around the world. On our Community Aid farms, we pay its farmers fixed-price, above market prices for their beans to ensure coffee quality and healthy, long term relationships with the communities

Pete’s passion for maintaining and improving the environment in coffee growing communities is equally strong as his concern for the people. During an annual tour of dozens of coffee farms some years ago, he found 94 acres of abandoned cattle land in Panama that was trampled and devoid of soil nutrients. He convinced his family to invest in the land in order to prove that organic farming techniques could indeed rehabilitate the lands and produce high quality coffee.

So we purchased the land, began composting the community's waste with the help of 12 million earthworms, dug irrigation channels, planted native tree species as well as 82,000 coffee trees, and waged a constant battle with the cattle grass that sprouted because they refused to use chemicals herbicides. We also left a good portion of the land in its natural state.

Today, on this once wasted land, a truly shade-grown,organic coffee farm has emerged. A rainforest now flourishes amidst the high-quality coffee trees, harboring 42 species of birds and 14 species of mammals. As seven million acres of rainforest - aka "the lungs of the earth" – vanishes each year, we hope that our farm will serve as an example that we can all make a difference on the planet- no matter how small.