About Finca El Pedregal

On the Ilamatepec mountain range at 1600 masl, is located Finca San Juan El Pedregal, Juayua. Since 1960, Raquel's family has been dedicated to coffee, fulfilling three generations of lovers of growing and caring for it. Her grandfather bought the first parcel of the farm and it grew over the years until it reached its current size of approximately 25 acres. Today, together with her sister, they are the first generation of women to manage the property, changing the paradigm that coffee farms are only managed by men.

Since she was a child, she visited the coffee plantation with her father as a family outing. They would take long walks on the field and play with the people who helped harvesting the coffee. Being so present on the farm from an early age marked her life, and she knew that when she grew up, her time would come to handle and care for it in honor of her father and grandfather.

Her father, having given her the management of the farm, became a mentor to her. He helps her when it's time to make decisions and teaches her lessons that come from years of experience in the trade. Some of the most important ones are the patience needed to preserve the quality of the coffee, giving it adequate shade maintenance, and irrigation and disease prevention. Therefore, by having the support and guidance of her father, they have created a special bond. In the same way, they share the same interest in growing the business and transmitting family love to the farm, due to the love for the cultivation and the history of effort and sacrifice behind it.

As you enter the farm, you can see the hills and the landscape, along with a beautiful and abundant vegetation. All of this, accompanied by a cool climate caused by clouds that go through the farm.

The farm's nursery stands out next to cypress, orange, bamboo trees and izote flowers along with the abundance of bees and wild fauna makes you feel connected with nature and clears your mind from everyday life.

In addition, the property is managed in a conventional way, a manual harvest is done, the coffee plantations are under shade and they opt for natural drying, which generates a delicious sweet coffee with fruity notes.

Currently, Raquel works with the Cooperativa San José La Majada, to which she gives roughly twenty six thousand four hundred pounds of green coffee that she produces per year. In the future, she hopes to sell a part locally. However, following her family value of perseverance, she has the vision of growing the farm, investing in production by planting new varieties of coffee and investing on herself by acquiring new knowledge to improve management and eventually scale nationally until achieving connections with new clients and exporting her coffee.

Raquel, marketer, an entrepreneur selling ground coffee and coffee beans, wife, mother of three children and passionate about cultivation, has many goals to improve the farm's performance as well as improving the current operations so that the project flourishes. Also, in the same way that her father teaches her, she instills family values in her children and hopes that in the future they will take care of the property in the same way that she, her father and her grandfather did, honoring the history of dedication, hard work and commitment that your ancestors created.