Miguel is the eldest brother in the Moreno family, and the driving force behind the Morenos’ collective movement to specialty coffee. He purchased La Orquidea in 2014 and began planting in 2015. The 2005 Cup of Excellence was a turning point for Miguel – his 18th place position at the competition came after years of struggling to make coffee production economically viable for his family. Coffee was so unsustainable that for a time, he felt forced to live and work in the US as an undocumented worker to keep food on the table for his family back home in El Cedral. The CoE wins (there have been many since 2005) have dramatically changed things for the family over the years, as they’ve wisely and progressively invested that year’s and subsequent auction winnings into better infrastructure for processing and drying. It takes a unique kind of person to come from a humble background — as the Morenos have — and make coffee cultivation a sustainable business for your family. It is not typically smallholder producers with family histories of small-scale agriculture that are the most successful coffee farmers and this is because it is incredibly challenging to first, consistently cultivate and produce the highest quality coffee and have access to a loyal customer base, and then on top of this, have the education and knowledge to speak quality at the same level as the buyer. The Morenos are in this special category of coffee producer and as with any other success story, their sustained top position requires a mixture of ambition, long-term planning, understanding what their market is looking for, and constant reevaluation and tweaking of agronomic, harvesting and processing techniques.
