David is in love, and it shows.

It’s 6h05 in the morning on an average December day when the first rays of sun timidly show up above the mountain range on the opposite side of the Mayorga farm. Honduras may well be a tropical country, here in the highlands the tender warmth of the sun is more than welcome, especially when the days are shorter and the wind sometimes blows from the far north.

It’s also early, even for Honduran standards, but David doesn’t care about cold or darkness. David is in love, and it shows. He’s nearing the end of his secondary education, specializing in agriculture, and his parents have recently decided to give him three heifers to tend to.

David is the youngest of three sons whose parents, Gabriel Sr and Maira, have always been determined to help them build better lives than they had themselves when they were children. Gabriel Sr grew up in a dirt-poor family in the very south of Honduras, where his family survived on subsistence farming. Maira’s parents were better off, but only marginally so, and with nine mouths to feed there was never a dime to spare.

Nevertheless, both Maira and Gabriel Sr were able to finish their education and find jobs that offered them a degree of stability by the time they married. Little by little, they were able to buy parcels of land and generate additional income from their farming activities while holding on to their formal jobs, which allowed them to offer their three sons a caring environment and cover their basic needs and a bit more.

Gabriel Jr was the first of the family to be sent off to university and both he and his brother Daniel are now engineers in agronomy with solid theoretical knowledge and increasingly vast practical experience as well. David, at age 16 (in 2025) isn’t there just yet but he is well on his way to building a future for himself as well.

Because even formal jobs do not tend to pay well, nor offer many opportunities for professional growth, the family decided to focus collectively on expanding their own enterprise. Maira’s grandparents own a bit of flat land just outside the small town of San Miguelito, which at 1,100 meters and in a slightly more arid region is ideally located to dry coffees, while also in the vicinity of higher, fertile coffee farmland.

In 2020, Gabriel Jr and Daniel decided to try their luck and start drying coffees on that piece of land. Their own family’s coffee, first and foremost. The three brothers and their parents together now own 9 hectares of land and Maira’s father, despite being in his eighties, also still cultivates his own parcel of coffee. But soon enough, Gabriel and Daniel started to build a name for themselves as knowledgeable young men who could be trusted to dry other farmers’ coffees in a consistent, homogeneous way for a fair price.

In the meanwhile, Gabriel Sr decided to let go of his formal job to focus entirely on developing the family’s 9 hectares. To improve the yield and quality of their coffee plants, but also to diversify into other crops. On their land there are now orange trees, mango, banana, plantain, pineapple and passion fruit, all for personal consumption and to sell. This variety of fruits each have their own harvest season, which means that there is enough work and – just as important – an additional source of income when there are no proceeds from the coffee.

Additionally, Gabriel Sr and the family also grow crops for their own consumption throughout the year, like corn and wheat. To further diversify the family’s income, youngest son David was allowed to keep the three heifers for milk and to either expand or sell the newborn calves later, depending on how successful he is.

In the meanwhile, Maira continues to work the job that she started in 2004, as director of Comipronil, a cooperative with 80 smallholder coffee farmer members. She has always liked running the coop, it has allowed her to learn the various management aspects of a larger structure, and she also gives back to a community of very poor, very small farmers spread out over the region where she grew up. On top of that, it offers the family a steady income to fall back on in more difficult times.

Indeed, now that the next generation is slowly starting to take over, it has become even more important to build a future through expansion and development of their patrimony and fully use their various skills and experience. There are many plans for the years ahead. Gabriel and Daniel are seriously considering investing 30,000 USD in the purchase of a mechanical dryer. It would allow them to continue to dry the family’s coffees, as well as other quality coffees, on their grandparents’ land in San Miguelito, but at the same time they would be able to dry larger volumes of standard coffees for other farmers faster, and without much additional labor.

They are also looking into possibilities to install solar energy. This isn’t easy in Honduras for lack of subsidies, lack of competition, and no options to sell surplus energy during peak moments, but it is still interesting because so often there are hours or even days with power outages.

Furthermore, the family is starting to connect with a few select roasters abroad with whom they intend to develop a long-term relationship. It would offer the roasters access to the same consistent quality coffee year after year and it would offer the family more stability and less stress when part of their costs is covered with stable sales.

Gabriel Jr recently passed his basic SCA degree and wants to continue to become a licensed Q-Grader. He knows from experience how much it is worth when you can cup your own coffees, as it enables you to separate your best lots and local buyers or intermediaries will no longer be able to offer a price that is lower than what your lots are worth.

Little by little, the future is taking shape, while the present is more solid and stable than the past, when Gabriel Sr and Maira were very young and were often not sure where their next meal was going to come from. The Mayorga family has come a long way and there is no doubt that they will continue to take their future into their own hands.