There's an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, but how much of it is grown according to the principles of spiritual guru Rudolf Steiner? Andrew Purvis talks to the farmers dedicated to helping the poor, respecting the workers – and producing some of the happiest skinny lattes on the planet

They call this place Terramater – "Earth Mother" – and the coffee bushes on Adeodato Menezes's small farm seem imbued with that spirit. "It's like a woman breastfeeding," the 63-year-old says, bending down to caress the ripe Catuai cherries low down on the bush. "These are her new babies," he adds, straightening up to touch the tightly furled leaves, green and tender, that will fruit the following year. It's not the kind of language I am used to on coffee farms – but Terramater, in the Chapada Diamantina region of Bahia state, in north-east Brazil, is far more than that. Set up as a Findhorn-style alternative community in the 1980s, it partly serves as a residential centre for disadvantaged teenagers from the favelas (slums) who are students of sistema agroflorestal – a farming system that combines the cultivation of commercial crops with the planting of native trees. It's a way of preserving the forest environment and rekindling skills used by indigenous people. On this subject Menezes is a world expert. » Read more: Op-Ed: Smell the Biodynamic Coffee

Fair Prices?

The idea of a fair price for a farmer, so that he can have a degree of quality of life and a just reward for his efforts, is a very basic idea, and I struggle to think of a way any other model of supply can function and survive. For instance, in business, if a trader cannot cover costs, then it’s only a matter of time until the bank forecloses and the business is no more. This happens every day all around the world, but we need to look at why this happens. For example, the trader has a product no one will pay the wholesale price for, or, his product is not of a high enough quality to satisfy the market place. Now, comparing this to the coffee market place, for years coffee buyers were not interested in quality (and many of the big multi-national companies still aren’t) therefore buying was solely price-driven, which always leads to a drop in quality. The emergence, in the early nineteen-eighties, of the speciality market, consisting of small roasters selling a high quality product, gave growers the chance to raise their standards, consequently raising the price of their coffee within the market place. Gourmet buyers will not buy poor quality. » Read more: Op-Ed: Fairtrade for who? - it's about coffee