Mayra Solis Ureña, Bean Voyage, Costa Rica | Anaerobic Natural FSC-9401

This lot comes from Alto el Vapor, the family coffee farm of Mayra Solis Ureña in Costa Rica. Her first memories of coffee are of school holidays spent picking cherry on relatives' farms to earn money for uniforms and school supplies. The family later began processing its own coffee out of necessity: adding value to the harvest was the way to improve profitability, pay off debts and keep the family land. The project began, in Mayra's words, with God's blessing. In the first processing seasons she and her children often worked until around 11pm, closing each day with a quiet "mission accomplished for today". Mayra has taken part in Bean Voyage, a non-profit that has supported smallholder women producers in Costa Rica since 2016 with training, finance, mentorship and market access, and she describes the programme as a cornerstone of the Alto el Vapor project. It gave her the tools to use the farm's human, natural, economic and technological resources more efficiently, and showed that coffee farming can be run as a sustainable economic activity with room to grow, create opportunities and build close personal connections. Her greatest challenge since has been retraining to move up the value chain, becoming not only a good grower but also a capable processor and seller of the farm's own coffee. Her aim is to grow the business both vertically and horizontally and to keep it going over time, providing decent work and enough profitability to produce coffee that is socially, environmentally and economically stable. For Mayra, adding value is what dignifies coffee growing, and her hope is that everyone who handles coffee from Alto el Vapor, at every link from farm worker to final consumer, feels honoured by and satisfied with their work. Being a coffee farmer, she says, means staying positive and continuing "in the tenacious struggle of fruitful work". What is now called resilience was once called bravery: doing everything within one's control, then looking to the sky for sun and for the early and late rains.