Finca Agua Tibia is part of Industrias Agrícolas Centro Americanas, S.A., a well- established Guatemalan corporation founded in 1886, committed for generations to the continuous improvement of its production processes, including the sustainable management of its people, environment and product quality.
The farm was originally acquired to supply combustion material for the boilers of a beer brewery. In the 1930s it expanded into cattle ranching with the importation of Holstein dairy cattle, and later introduced Angus beef cattle, becoming a pioneering reference farm in Guatemala.
Coffee was introduced around the 1950s, with Bourbon and Typica as the founding varieties. Since 2011, 5% of the older plantations are renewed each year, with Caturra and Catuaí introduced as part of this ongoing pruning and renovation program. In 2016 the farm introduced Centroamericano H1 (Rome Sudan × Sarchimor), seeking both productivity and quality. Today H1 covers 4 hectares, with a goal of increasing its production in the coming years.
Today, 300 of the farm’s 1,530 hectares are dedicated to coffee. The farm also produces avocado, corn and ornamental plants, and the family keeps some dairy cattle. In addition, 465 hectares are dedicated to natural forest and 400 are dedicated to commercial forest.
Agua Tibia is managed by Erick de la Roca, a fourth-generation coffee producer who also owns his own farm, La Esperanza, in Acatenango. Erick lives on the farm at Agua Tibia with his wife and three children, and has been managing it since 2011. He oversees all of the activities on the farm, however coffee is his primary focus and he has been charged with improving both the quality and yield produced.
ABOUT THE CENTROAMERICANO VARIETY
Centroamericano, or H1, is a hybrid of the Sarchimor T5296 and Sudan Rume varieties. Created by a consortium including French research institute CIRAD, a regional network of national coffee institutes in Central America (PROMECAFE), and a coffee gene bank in Costa Rica (CATIE), Centroamericano is a dwarf variety that has great resistance to coffee leaf rust, high yields and very good cup quality. Our good friend and exporter,r Eduardo Ambrocio was part of the group of coffee professionals who evaluated the trials of the hybrid as it was being developed.
Agua Tibia, and many other farms in Guatemala, are choosing to use varieties like Centroamericano because of their resistance to Roya and potential for excellent cup quality at higher elevations. The challenge of this hybrid, however, is that it can’t be propagated through seeds, but rather they can only be reproduced through clonal propagation, which entails using plant material from a ‘mother plant.’ This process is slow and somewhat expensive, but worth it for many farmers, as the productivity, resistance and quality potential of Centroamericano are quite high.
