Our founders, Ben and Kristy Carlson, moved to Burundi in 2011 and saw that both injustice and poor farming practices permeated the country’s newly privatized coffee industry. They also saw that roasters around the world had a difficult time getting consistently great coffees from Burundi. In an effort to see positive change in both farmers’ and roasters’ lives, Long Miles Coffee was born.
To us, coffee production is a combined effort that takes into account the needs of coffee farmers and the needs of the roasters we work with worldwide. When you trust us with a coffee order not only do you get a thoughtfully produced coffee, but you directly impact coffee farming communities. Beyond that, you have the opportunity to build relationships with specific hills and those who grow coffee there, year upon year.
Coffee holds so much potential. It has the ability to change a landscape and transform a people, but it is so easy to feel distant from the origin of your coffees and the impact your purchase makes on coffee-growing communities. We understand your need for both transparency and great coffee, which is why we started Long Miles Coffee as a farmer-driven coffee production model back in 2013. Our first coffee season we worked with just fifty coffee farmers, we now work with over 5,500 coffee farming families on eleven unique hills within Burundi, with expansion efforts underway into Uganda and Kenya.
We create traceable micro-lots that yield consistently great coffees while improving the livelihoods of the small holding farmers who grow them. Here are three of the most important ways we do this:
- The farmers who grow coffee on the eleven hills we work with receive year-round agricultural assistance through one of our twenty-six Long Miles Coffee Scouts who are all well trained junior agronomists.
- We do the simplest and best thing we could do for coffee farmers; we pay higher prices for coffee cherries as well as annual premiums.
- We strengthen relationships between roaster and farmer so that if you want, you can serve coffee from a specific hill year after year.
Purchasing Long Miles Coffee means becoming a part of our team, which is a team dedicated to making coffee a sustainable part of all of our futures.