Colombia
Finca el Suelo
About Finca el Suelo
Owned and run by Tim Wendelboe, Finca el Suelo is a 7 hectare farm located in El Vegon, in the municipality of El Pital in Huila, Colombia. It lies on an altitude of 1650 – 1700 masl. next to Finca Tamana.
This is the first time we have farmed coffee, so we consider this a learning project. We work only with nature, focusing on bringing our soil back to life by making our own compost as the main inoculant for increasing beneficial soil microbe populations.
We believe that healthy soils will give us healthy trees and better coffees.
Our goal is to figure out how to raise coffee quality and increase production with regenerative biological farming practices, and hopefully inspire other farmers to do the same.
But we have to succeed first.
Farm location: Huila, Colombia
How to buy Finca el Suelo coffee
The 2023 harvest will be for sale in April 2024.
This year we are dividing the sales of the coffee from Finca el Suelo among our coffee subscribers, our wholesale / business customers and also our loyal guests in our coffee shop. That means you will need to subscribe to our coffee and newsletter to get notified when we will be selling the coffee through our webshop. Due to limited availability we will restrict the purchase to one 100g bag per person and the coffee is sold on a first come first serve basis.
Follow Finca el Suelo on Instagram here, to stay up to date on our progress with the farm.
Our Third Harvest
At the moment we have planted around 600 trees on the farm. Most of those coffee trees are Ethiopian landrace cultivars and a few Geisha trees. We also have a small Cultivar museum / garden where we keep a few trees of different cultivars to see how they perform and in order to keep a small seed bank of these rare coffee trees.
Most of the trees that are producing were planted in the field in early 2019 and 2020. From August 2021 we started picking small amounts of coffee from our Ethiopian Landrace trees along with a few of the cultivars in our museum / cultivar garden.
In the 2023 main harvest, between May and August, we were able to harvest slightly more coffee than last year with a total yield of 50 kg of green coffee.
After tasting and doing extensive quality control, we ended up with 30 kg of the best quality from our Ethiopian landrace cultivar. We believe the quality has slightly improved from previous years despite that we had a long period with no rain and very dry conditions in 2023. Since the volumes were slightly bigger it made it easier to harvest and process the coffee which means the quality improved slightly.
We will be roasting this coffee on our Loring S35 roaster in mid -April. Since we only have 30 kilos of the coffee, we only have one shot at roasting it. Fortunately we now have a lot of experience with roasting different cultivars and coffees from our neighbouring farm, Finca Tamana so we have a good idea of how we want to roast this coffee.
Finca El Suelo Timeline
2015
We take ownership of the parcel of land that would be come Finca El Suelo. We begin the process of applying compost tea, planting shade trees and of course, planting coffee.
2018
The farm is not progressing because the soil isn’t healthy enough. Most of the trees we planted in 2015 are dead. We start planning for planting new coffee trees in less quantities to focus our attention on smaller areas of the farm.
2020
A total of 600 coffee trees are now growing and they are growing quite well due to the new planting techniques that we learned while visiting in Kenya. Because there are less trees we are able to add loads of wood chips, compost, compost extract and compost tea.
2021
In late 2021 we were able to harvest the first cherries from our farm. The 110 trees we planted in 2019 are growing tall and are producing a good amount of coffee cherries. The volumes are still small but big enough to bring some home to roast and sell.