Be sure to watch the video below as Ernesto unpacks the rich family history and heritage that La Dalia Coffee was built on. In this video, Ernesto walks us through the origin of La Dalia Farms and explains all of the amazing, eco-friendly and organic methods that go into making the perfect cup of coffee for your enjoyment. If you are curious to know more about what makes La Dalia Coffee a “Specialty Coffee”, this video is a great place to start!
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Video Transcription:
Hello. My name is Ernesto Altamirano, and the founder of La Dalia Coffee. And today I’m here to tell you guys the origin of our company and our farm.
So it started back in the 70s. My mom is from Nicaragua and during that time, there was a war in Nicaragua. So my grandma, who wanted to take her kids out of the country because of the war and what was going on.
So she went to Argentina seeking education. She went to Cordoba, Argentina, which is where my dad is from. So when she attended school, she met my dad. They met and fell in love. My dad tried different businesses when he got to Nicaragua. And then this opportunity came up where there was this coffee farm that was for sale. So my dad decides to go and check out this farm; he tells my mom. My mom is pregnant with me at the time. My mom says, ok let’s go and see what this farm is about.
So they get on this trip. It was about five hours that it took them to get to the farm. It was a very challenging trip, to the point where there wasn’t a road built to the farm. So to this stopping point, they had to get off the truck and start walking. So here’s my mom, being pregnant with me at the time, walking to this place. They get there and it’s a very remote area. And my mom looks at my dad and says, ‘you have to be out of your mind’ There’s no way we’re buying this farm’.
But my dad being the visionary that he was, he saw the opportunity. He saw the vision and he wanted to do something with that land. So he decides to obviously, with my mom’s consent and support, they both finally agree. He convinced my mom to say ok, let’s get the farm. They purchase the farm.
Everything was great. They started growing these different coffee varieties on the farm. My dad gets all these loans, and he’s growing the coffee beautifully. Everything was going fantastic until the year 2000. This is when Brazil produced an enormous amount of coffee in the world. So the coffee world was saturated, flooded with coffee from Brazil. So the coffee price tanked. It went down to as cheap as low as $40 a bag of coffee, which was not even enough to cover costs. So we went under and my parents really didn’t know what to do at that point. Because the farm was blooming. The farm was amazing. The farm was really producing beautiful coffee, but it wasn’t worth anything.
So the bank approached and said well if you guys can’t pay us back, we’re going to just take the farm away from you guys. So in terms of about two to three years, we just started losing everything. We lost the trucks, we lost tractors, we lost all these things that my mom and my dad had worked so hard to get. So things were really really rough. Times were really really tough.
My mom found out that there’s this farmer who lost his farm to the same bank that my mom had lost the farm to, and he’s suing the bank. So my mom makes contact with this person and decides to join him on filing a lawsuit against the bank. After a long battle of 10 years, we ended up actually getting the farm back. The saddest thing from this though is that a year before we got the farm back, my mom passed away. And she passed away not necessarily because she was ill. But because she fell into deep mental depression from everything that had happened to us and our family.
So for some years, I had this very strange relationship with coffee. It was like a love and hate relationship. Like something hit me, and then I realized that that’s really my calling. Like I can really make a change and I can fix the problem, and help out the farmers, the people, the producers that work so hard.
I started importing coffee to the U.S. And little by little, I started importing more coffee. And now we have a company that encompasses every aspect of the coffee industry of the chain. We’re so unique because we sell the coffee that we grow. My family did a fantastic job getting the coffee up and running up until the point of the exporters.
So what I did is I took that specialty coffee and brought it from Nicaragua to the U.S. So we are getting rid of all this, what we call the middle man. And now, we’re selling directly to the consumers, we handle it all. We handle the exports, the imports, the warehouse, the roasting, the bagging, the shipping, the labeling, everything.
So we are in a very unique position because we grow the coffee that we sell. So what makes us so unique and so different is that our coffee comes from real people. And not just regular ordinary people. But loving people. The people that work for us at the farm are families that joyfully pick the coffee. They are there working hard to make a better living for their families. So it’s this direct connection that we are creating between the consumer and the farmer. Every time you buy coffee from us, it’s helping the community. It’s helping our families. And again, the families that work in the farms making this coffee a possibility. Awesome great tasting coffee directly to your cup from our farm in Nicaragua.
So like and subscribe. We’re going to be recording and filming a lot of videos, very interesting videos of our farms, of different methods, of everything that’s related to coffee. So please make sure that you like and subscribe. So click the link below to learn. We would love to hear from you. And until the next one, thank you so very much for your time!