Spotlight on Daterra: Historical Context

Arriving at Daterra, in the Cerrado region of Brazil, you quickly sense that you’ve come to one of the most biologically rich savannas in the world, as any number of green parakeets, marmosets, toucans, and red-legged seriemas emerge to greet you. Biodiversity should come as no surprise at Daterra due to their conservation efforts, where more than half of the roughly 16-thousand-acre estate is intentionally kept as a biological preserve. Additionally striking is the dusty, rust colored terrain that dominates the landscape in the dry season, which runs from around June to August. At first glance, the ground doesn’t appear as though it would be hospitable for crop production, and for a long time, it was not. Before the 1960s, the vast Cerrado region was considered unfit for most farming due to the high acidity of the soil and its general lack of nutrients. However, in step with the ‘green revolution’¹ of the second half of the 20th century, the Cerrado would eventually adapt to become the agricultural and livestock powerhouse it is today. Fueled largely by the Brazilian state-owned research corporation established in Brazil in the 1970s, called Embrapa, massive swaths of the Cerrado were made viable for farming with the application of limestone and phosphorus, which both reduce the acidity of soil and help round out the primary nutrients required for plants to thrive. With the soil made hospitable to a wider breadth of commodity agriculture, large scale farming and livestock projects in the Cerrado had proliferated rapidly by the late 1900’s, and this is largely where Daterra’s story begins.

To truly appreciate the historical legacy of the coffee trade in Brazil, however, and the beginning of Daterra’s story more particularly, it's worthwhile to go back a bit further. Before the green revolution of the 1960s would make its mark on the Cerrado, many other parts of Brazil had already been prepared for large-scale agriculture as a result of a legacy of slave labor that began when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil with the first slave ship from Africa in 1526, thus establishing the Atlantic slave trade. Slave labor would remain a driver of pre and post-colonial economic interests in Brazil, at the same time as the global coffee market was growing, until slavery was ultimately abolished in 1888. From the time efforts to dissolve the slave trade began in 1850 and on into the early twentieth century, large landholders that depended on slave labor for centuries started to read the writing on the wall. This included landowners who had invested in Brazil’s booming coffee trade:

"Fazendeiros [farm owners] there, producing coffee for a buoyant world market, found themselves in an unprecedented situation: for the first time in the history of Brazil, slavery could no longer supply the labour needs of the most dynamic sector of the economy.²"

The response to this void of essential labor was a new focus by landowners and the Brazilian government on attracting immigrants from Europe, namely Italy, to fill it:

"The coffee fazendeiros of the north and west of São Paulo, where the demand for slave labour was greatest… had finally secured at this critical juncture an alternative source of labour in the form, not of free Brazilian wage labourers, but European, mainly Italian, immigrants. As early as 1878, Italy, which was suffering rapid population growth, land hunger and unemployment, [proved to be] the most promising source of non-slave labour for coffee production in São Paulo. Italians began to arrive in significant numbers from the mid 1880s. In 1884 São Paulo had received 5,000 European, mostly Italian, immigrant workers, their transportation subsidised by the provincial government; 6,500 in 1885, 9,500 in 1886 and 32,000 arrived in 1887.³"

Shortly after this period, major global conflicts concentrated in European countries throughout the early 20th century would help maintain this trend of immigration and would continue to include large populations from Italy, Germany, and Japan as well. It is due to this history of immigration to Brazil that we still see a significant Italian diaspora there today. One such family of Italian heritage that immigrated to Brazil in the early 1900s was the Pascoal family, the founding family of Daterra. While early members of the Pascoal family that arrived in Brazil started by joining the coffee trade as employees on coffee farms, they would ultimately find their first success in the automotive services industry in Brazil, near the more developed city of Campinas in São Paulo. Today the DPaschoal automotive and tire shops, named after founder Donato Pascoal, can still be found throughout Brazil. It wasn't until the 1990s, after a reintroduction to the coffee trade and the global rise of specialty coffee and espresso culture, that the Pascoal family would choose the Cerrado to begin concentrating investments in coffee production, leading to the beginnings of the Daterra we know today. With the benefit of agricultural advancements that made the soil of Cerrado hospitable to farming, it turned out that the region was ideally suited to a unique style of coffee production.

Not only does the Cerrado reach altitudes suitable for coffee production, around 1000-1200 meters above sea level, it is also located across several massive plateaus where flat terrain allows for the use of farming and harvesting equipment that otherwise could not be used in a more steep and mountainous setting. The Cerrado also maintains very distinct wet and dry seasons. The rainy season starts around September (springtime in the Cerrado), and the rains generally continue until the beginning of summer in January-February, as coffee cherries begin to develop on the plants. The consistency of these rains is critical for the growth cycle of coffee, as the rains transport nutrients to the branches in order to prompt and maintain the development of buds, flowers, and, finally, cherries. If the rains taper off too much during this period, the plants will drop what flowers they’ve developed in an effort to conserve resources, thus diminishing overall yields. By April and into May, cherries have started to mature as rains taper ahead of the dry season, which runs roughly from June to August. Again, this dry season must be consistent for a successful harvest. Too much rain during a dry season can knock developed cherries from their branches, contribute to the development of molds and fungus, and make drying the coffee after harvest extremely difficult. The long dry season at Daterra, however, with its direct sun farming, means that the majority of the coffee there will be left to dry completely on the tree before harvesting. With very little tree canopy to shade the coffee on the farms, this ‘fully dried on tree’ method has become so synonymous with the region where it’s practiced that it's often more simply referred to as ‘Cerrado coffee’. It is speculated that yellow varieties arose in Cerrado as the coffee plant's natural response to the full sun and heat of its growing conditions, as yellow skins absorbed less heat than red, thus putting less stress on the seeds within the cherry. In part because Daterra has depended on the consistencies of these weather patterns, the team is well aware that the climate is changing. Prominently displayed behind a desk when you first walk into one of the main Daterra offices is a corkboard dedicated to graphs of recorded rainfall patterns that have occurred at Daterra for the past 35 years. While the team at Daterra made a point of saying so, it is clear when viewing the board that the weather has changed over the years, particularly in the past 10 to 15. While the general patterns of wet and dry seasons have held somewhat, they’re less consistent month to month, and the overall peaks of crucial rainfall during the wet season have clearly begun to decrease. As one of our hosts commented about the display, “We like to keep this here in case someone suggests that it [climate change] isn’t happening.”

From the beginning, a primary objective of Daterra's founders was the development of an innovative, research-driven specialty coffee farm grounded in the pursuit of environmental preservation, regenerative agriculture, and social development. Together with an appreciation of deeply concerning new climate realities, these core values have driven Daterra to become one of the most forward-thinking coffee farms of scale in the world. The team at Daterra has planted over 600,000 native trees in Cerrado since its inception, and in 2021, they announced an ambitious commitment to increase their carbon sequestration a further 50% by 2030, with the planting of 20 million additional trees. As for research at Daterra, one of our hosts during a recent visit put it this way: “Daterra is not only a farm, but a scientific lab that happens to produce coffee.” Indeed, one of Daterra’s many devoted farm plots includes an experimental farm exclusively for the research of coffee genetics, with over 150 different unique genetic materials currently at its disposal. Daterra partners with a number of scientific institutions in Brazil in ongoing attempts to “find and develop varietals that are more resilient to climate change, pests, diseases and of course, that display amazing taste profile.” We were fortunate enough to get to see and taste some of the results of this work in our most recent visit to Daterra, such as the bourbon-pointu Laurina variety and the unique Aramosa pre-cultivar: a hybrid between the arabica and racemosa species of the coffea genus, designed in part for its resistance to the leaf miner pest⁴. We cupped and learned about ongoing projects Daterra is hosting with one of its main research partners, the Agronomic Institute of Campinas (AIC), which recently collaborated with Ethiopian authorities to select, grow, and study specific heirloom genetics at Daterra, from clippings that were transported from the regions of Kaffa, Harar, and Shewa in Ethiopia. Lastly, we were able to hear fascinating insights from a visiting plant geneticist at Daterra who shared details of her work surrounding a major dominant gene from the Liberica species, called SH3, that has been used to confer leaf rust resistance properties to arabica species.

Daterra is truly a special place. It's a place that doesn't merely talk a big game when it comes to sustainability. It's a farm that is leading the charge: conducting progressive research that will be critical to the future of coffee and the success of coffee producers throughout the coffee-growing world. For this reason and many others (including the continued fact that their coffees are delicious!), we at Passenger are very proud to continue building our partnership with the team at Daterra. As we approach our fifth consecutive year working with Daterra, we are delighted to return from our most recent visit with goals in place to bring a broader variety of their offerings to Passenger’s menu in the coming years.

Keep an eye on our website for new menu additions and insights to come.

1. The green revolution was a boom in agricultural production worldwide, beginning around the 1960’s, due to the development and introduction of various new technologies and agronomic approaches.
2. Bethell, Leslie. “The Decline and Fall of Slavery in Brazil (1850–88).” In Brazil: Essays on History and Politics, 113–44. University of London Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv51309x.8.
3. Ibid.
4. The leaf miner is a small moth whose larvae burrows into and feeds on the leaves of arabica coffee plants, leading to patches of necrosis of the leaf.