How we verify what we say
Almost everything we know about a farm we were told sitting on it. Very little of it was shown to us on paper. Both are worth something, but they are not worth the same, and on this site they are never written the same way.
Three levels, and we always say which one we are on
| What we hold | What the page says |
|---|---|
| A certificate, issued by an accredited certifier, which we photographed and kept | "Certified organic", with the certifier's name and the date it runs out |
| What the producer told us during the visit, with their signature | The practice, with "according to the farm" underneath |
| Nothing — we did not ask, or it was not clear | Nothing. A blank space is an honest answer |
Why almost none of our farms says "organic"
In Ecuador the word orgánico — like ecológico andbiológico — is not a loose adjective: it is reserved by Agrocalidad's regulations for producers holding certification from an accredited body. Using it without the certificate is misleading advertising.
And certification costs money. For a three-hectare farm in Vilcabamba it can cost more per year than the harvest brings in. So most of our producers work without a single chemical and still cannot call it organic — and neither can we.
What we can do is tell you exactly what they told us, with their name on it.
The practices we ask about
The list is closed on purpose. If every farm described it in their own words we would have six vocabularies and you could compare nothing. We ask it open — "tell me how you work it" — and tick what they say, not what we would like to hear.
Some of it holds for the whole farm:
- No burning
- Family farm
The rest we ask product by product. A farm does not grow its coffee the way it grows its cacao, and its coffees are not always grown alike either. That is also where we note how it was dried:
- No agrochemicals
- Shade grown
- Own compost
- Rainfed, no irrigation
- Own seed
- Pulping water treated
- Sun-dried on a patio
- Dried on raised beds
- Dried under a solar tent
- Machine dried
Forest
"Deforestation-free" is a label anyone can print. We prefer a question with a date:since when has the plot been the size it is today? When the producer tells us, we publish it with the year.
During the visit we also record the plot's coordinates. Those are never published — it is the location of a family's home — but they are kept, because the day we export to Europe we will be asked for them, and they cannot be invented from Quito.
When we stop saying it
An expired certificate is not a certificate. On the day it lapses the page stops mentioning it by itself, without anyone having to remember to go and delete it. It seemed the only way for this to still be true in two years.
If something here does not add up
If you see a claim on this site that does not look right, write to us and we will check it against what we hold. If we cannot stand it up, we take it down.