Puerto Rican Coffee and the Forgotten Forest with Domenico Celli

Welcome back to the Community Agriculture Project. Our second episode is an interview with Domenico Celli aka Puentes Naturales. Domenico is based in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico in barrio Tanamá where he operates an agroforestry coffee farm and beneficiado that provides services to support local coffee farmers in any stage of the coffee production pipeline.

The mission statement of his project, known as the Forgotten Forest Puerto Rico project, is as follows:

“We believe that the best way to make small-scale coffee farming sustainable in Puerto Rico is to focus on the highest quality. As part of the United States, we have much higher production costs than almost anywhere else in the world where coffee is grown (Latin America and Africa). However, there is very limited local market able to support these higher prices— the average per capita  ...