Coffee Conversations: Ana Vizcaino on Battling Climate Change in Guatemala

Ana Vizcaino has been running Finca Esperanza in Guatemala since 2009, having inherited it from her father as a conventional coffee farm. She immediately worked to turn it organic, with all the ups and downs that such a project entailed.

Since then she has also started exporting, building a mill and forming Two Birds Coffee with her son Diego in 2014 to connect directly with roasters and navigate the treacherous coffee supply chain in a more equitable manner. As Two Birds grew and her other children joined the business, they began to expand to help other local farmers find a market in the United States as well as Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Like many coffee farms around the world, Finca Esperanza has been dealing with the impacts of climate breakdown. I spoke with Vizcaino about this two years ago, but I wanted to learn more about how things have progressed since then. It has been hard: Last year, Vizcaino posted on LinkedIn about the wildfires that ravaged her region of Guatemala, which then also had to deal with unseasonable rains.

There are other compounding issues all linked to climate change, from deforestation to the creeping growth of cities to the lack of workers. Vizcaino and I spoke in early December, and we talked about all this and more, including the impact of the coffee price surge over the past year.

This is another in an ongoing series of interviews with coffee industry stakeholders. You can find the others here. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

What has your experience been of the impacts of climate change over the past year?

Without a strategy, without a government that has a strategy for what nature is doing, I don't know how we are going to really survive. This past year, 2024, we saw five metres of rain. So it's a normal amount of rain for this area, but the mountain is dry. The volcano is dry. It's not saturated with water, even though we had five metres of rain.

Definitely on the mountain, we know that because of the fires, there's deforestation for sure. The guys from the farm, they get together and they go and take pictures of the mountain at this time of the year. And so I asked them to take pictures of where the fires went, but they say that they can see the whole side of the volcano bare.

The city is growing this way, pushing to come all this way, and then this deforestation on the volcano—where is the water? It's just a matter of time that people are going to start really suffering because there's not enough water for all these people.

Talking about coffee, when you renovate an area of coffee, you cut [the trees] all the way to maybe a foot and a half from the soil. You just cut it, and it starts to bloom maybe in April or May with the first rains. You see the foliage starting to grow out of this stock, right? And this year, it was June, July, and we thought it was dead because we couldn't see blooming. So that's really weird for us, everything is like a month behind. We are having rain in November, and that's very strange, very strange.

Is that going to impact the next harvest?

I think so. We are behind in everything—flowering this year was in April, and usually it is in February or March. In March we saw a very crazy flowering event, and then in the beginning of April, we saw the next. Another product that we get out of the farm is firewood. We control the shade, the shade of the coffee farm. We control it, and we sell [the wood]. And this year it didn't flower either, so we couldn't get seeds out of the trees because there was no fruit.

(In a follow up text just before publication, Ana wrote that: We lost 40% of our harvest this year due to nine days of continuous rain during Christmas time, when we are at the peak of the harvest. The rest of the cherries fell because of the rain, or shrivelled and dried like Naturals on the tree, the green cherries never really ripened. It was a mess.)

I think I'm not going to see it, but I think the people that are younger than me in the next generation are going to see a very different type of farm. Maybe you need to irrigate or something, I don't know. We barely had enough water for the mill last year. And we have seen more wind because the city is coming all the way north to us. We see more wind at the farm than years before, and that's because there's no trees.

Do the shade trees on your farm help a bit with that?

It is, it is helping. [Finca Esperanza] is one of the last farms with trees, really. Both farms next to me, they have no trees. They only have coffee, and my brother has macadamia trees. So there's no variety of forest or anything, you know. It's just one kind of tree.

Are the farms next to yours struggling with the weather more?

Actually, I think a lot of them are changing product. My next door neighbour now has cardamom. I think his contract with the people that buy his coffee is going to be due this year or next year, and then I think the whole farm is going to be cardamom. And the farm next to it, they sold part of the farm, so now it's a development.

I'm sure that a lot of the countries in Central America are this way. There's no strategy for how to manage water, right? So they just build the land and hopefully they're going to have water. And without the government stepping in to say, every development has to have a water strategy, I don't know how this is going to work. 

Can we talk a little about the surge in coffee prices over the past year—you are also an exporter with Two Birds Coffee, so how has the price increase impacted you and your work?

Most of the producers that Diego buys from, that Two Birds buys from, they stayed with us because we have been paying $2.80 and above [per pound] consistently. So for them, it made sense—we couldn't do $3.30, but we have been paying them almost $3, and some [more] depending on the score, for years now.

I think coffee should be a little more expensive for sure, but it should be gradually getting to that point, so it's stable, right? Because people leave the farms because they don't have enough money, but we also don't take care of the land. I don't understand these farms that think that it is not going to happen to them, but they don't have any water anymore when before this was rainforest.

I prefer to have a smaller harvest, but it's shaded. They just think that by putting more chemicals and more nitrogen and more this and more that they're gonna have a big harvest. And they do! But there's no water. They have to do more and more every year, more chemicals and more stuff, you know, and you spend more money on your coffee because you have to buy more products.

This $3 thing for me is like smoke, [the money] is gonna disappear because everything is more expensive now. If the harvest is not going to be as good as before because there's no water, then what does that $3 do for you?

Have you seen people exploring more natural processes and honey processes in Guatemala because of the lack of water?

Yeah, a lot of [my neighbours] more towards El Salvador, they do a lot of naturals. I am doing it too; I just prepared the recipe. The idea is to use less water, so what I do is, I'm using a fermentation with yeast, a special yeast for coffee, and the yeast eats all the mucilage, or most of it, and then on the patio or in African beds, you dry it that way and and we barely use any water anymore. It's more expensive because the yeast is expensive, but this is a very good solution for us.

Are farmers around you becoming more interested in planting shade trees and using fewer fertilisers and that kind of thing—at least because of the high costs, if not the implications of climate change?

No, people don’t care; people don’t see how that’s going to change the weather. They don't think about the future at all, it's just year by year. We had a good harvest, now it’s $3.30; okay, let's get a lot of money next year. And not everybody is gonna give it to the workers. I mean, where is that $3 going to go? I know big farmers, for example, that just put it in their bank.

Migration is going to continue because [the money] doesn't get to the workers. And here, climate change is a real thing, and the distribution of money is a real thing also, and we don't have workers anymore. Everyone's leaving. I have a friend, for example, his farm is a beautiful, beautiful place in the mountains, he has a ton of rivers around, and his whole harvest is still on the plants because he doesn't have anybody to pick it.

It’s not only about the price of coffee, it has to be two things at the same time: We need to take care of the farms, but also the money has to take care of the people too. If you want to keep the workers here, the farm has to be sustainable for them. So the problem is not just the money, it’s money and where it goes to. If it's gonna go to more chemicals, because the chemicals are more expensive, then there's no solution.