Growing coffee, just like growing anything else, takes time. Nothing happens overnight; the hard work you put in today doesn’t pay off tomorrow. To cultivate coffee, you have to cultivate a field first, and to cultivate a field, you have to work the soil first.　 Everything’s a process that you need to invest in. Some things just take time to create and develop. People are a good example. “Developing people” is exactly what Pedro Rodriguez, a Bolivian grower we profiled years ago (Dear Grower #008), is trying to do. He saw the writing on the wall: the coffee-growing community Bolivia was dwindling, and coffee export levels had fallen by almost 70% in just 10 years’ time. “At this rate,” Pedro realized, “Bolivian coffee’s just going to disappear.” Sensing an impending crisis, Pedro decided to pass the coffee-production expertise he’d gathered over the years on to young, aspiring growers. The program he launched to make that knowledge transfer possible is called “Sol de la Mañana”: Spanish for “sun in the m

Hoping to be part of that bright new light, Lucia Mamani and Humberto Vilka decided to join the second cohort of Pedro’s program. They’re a married couple, and they’re committed to coffee. After inheriting her father’s coffee farm more than 20 years ago, Lucia has kept the operation running and producing beans ever since. Taking part in the program has changed her approach: whereas she used to follow the typical approach for small-scale Bolivian growers, tending to stay away from the farm outside of harvest season, she’s now running things on-site year-round. Her husband, Humberto, used to be a truck driver to supplement the family income—but now, he’s all about growing coffee.

Lucia and everyone else in the group were eager to get to a higher level. The road there wasn’t an easy one, though. Pedro designed the curriculum to challenge the growers; in his mind, it was supposed to be a grueling process. He wanted everyone to know that the goal wasn’t just to get quality and quantity levels up—it was to get them up and keep them there, a consistency that hinges on having a solid grip on modern cultivation methods and continuing to put insights into practice. That’s the kind of mindset and ability Pedro wanted to foster in the participants. He broke the growing process into discrete steps with specific tasks and challenges to complete. If a participant didn’t finish the tasks by the given time limit, they’d have to start over from scratch the following year.

While the members had to navigate through some confusion as they built stronger, more trusting relationships, their eyes started to gleam with excitement as soon as they saw their efforts paying off in first step of the process—making seedbeds. They saw that they were capable of doing great work. That confidence kept building and building, making everyone even more driven to hone their skills. People even started going out of their way to share what they’d learned with each other; the synergy was palpable. As he watched the participants embrace the learning process, Pedro must have felt validated. His program was doing what he wanted it to achieve. But the true measure of success was the quality of the participants’ beans. The group didn’t disappoint there: the cupping scores for their beans exceeded expectations, with Lucia garnering an impressive 87 points.

It’s still hard to be overly optimistic about the crisis facing Bolivian coffee, but it’s not hard to see a world of promise in the success of the Sol de la Mañana project. Pedro has already accepted 50 growers into his next group of participants. The Bolivian sun is shining bright today.