Producer Spotlight: Daterra

After a long hiatus due to pandemic-related logistical challenges, we are thrilled to announce that a beautiful coffee from Daterra has recently rejoined the Foundational Menu! This latest addition from the 2022 harvest, a dry processed yellow catuaí selection, offers a classic and deeply pleasing Cerrado profile: rich chocolate sweetness with complementary notes of dried fruit and red berries.

Among the farms where Passenger is currently purchasing coffee, Daterra is unique in many ways. At 6,405 hectares (~ 16,000 acres) in size, it is certainly the largest farm that we are working with. And Daterra’s scale, topography, and its owner’s long term investment in technological innovation have all contributed to a model of coffee cultivation, harvesting, and processing that differs in many respects to every other farm represented on our menus. While the most obvious visual example may be the massive fields of coffee trees that have been strategically planted for pivot style irrigation and mechanized coffee harvesting machines, a genuine spirit of research-based innovation and scientific inquiry is also notable here. Most significantly, a central aim of Daterra’s extensive team and significant resources is to model how agribusinesses like theirs can positively impact the planet: responding to the crisis of climate change with the development and implementation of regenerative agricultural practices.

Given Daterra’s size, its status as a negative emissions agribusiness (i.e. a business that absorbs more CO2 than it emits) is all the more inspiring. More than half of the farm is reserved exclusively for natural preservation and 300 hectares of land have been intentionally reforested in recent years. The team has planted over 600,000 native trees in Cerrado since the beginning of the project, and in 2021 they announced an ambitious commitment to increasing their carbon sequestration a further 50% by 2030, with the planting of 20 million additional trees.

Passenger’s green buying team last visited Daterra as a part of a sourcing trip to Brazil in July, 2022. Here are a few photos and videos from that trip.