Rio Negro is a remote village nestled in the hills of Huila's Iquira municipality. Historically, it has been a challange to export coffee from this area as farmers had been taking their harvests all the way to Neiva, more than an eight hour drive round-trip. The average family in this region consists of about five members and typically hired workers are not used as the family works together to bring in the harvests each year. Rio Negro has been a traditional coffee farming town for many years, inheriting the practice from their ancestors and pursuing improvments in terms of cultivation, harvest, and process each year.
The average farm size in this area is three to six hectares, with about 3,500 coffee trees per hectare. With rich volcanic soil, an average temperature between 15-22° C, and at least 140 CM of rainfall annually, Rio Negro has great coffee producing potential. Coffee is picked ripe, processed on the same day, fermented wet and dry for an average time of 18-24 hours, and washed three to five times. It is then sun dried for 12-18 days, then stacked on wooden pallets for about 20 days before it is hulled.
For more information on Colombian coffees, visit our Colombia origin page.
