OUR STORY
AGRO AGAPE
When I visited my relatives in Koh Kong province in 2017, I realised a sad thing: my uncle's coffee farm had dropped out of market, even though Cambodia's coffee production is low and the country imports 90% of its coffee consumption. The reason was (i) because first he depended on middle men from Thailand to buy his production of raw coffee beans; whenever the buyer from Thailand did not turn up, my uncle lost his product because he did not know how to process the beans and access the Cambodian market. This is why I started this coffee business: to help my uncle and other farmers accessing market for their coffee.
Vision
Vision: is to see Cambodian rural communities improve their income and well-being, by helping them develop high-quality products for the agricultural market, through modern technologies and eco-friendly, climate change-mitigation strategies.
Mission
* Engage farmers to increase quality and quantity of local coffee production; decrease the market share for imported products.
* Increase rural employment, including of women & persons with disability; increase income for farmers in rural areas of Cambodia..
* Adopt and further develop environment-friendly and biodiversity-promoting processes (waste recycling, solar power).
* Establish a more profitable supply chain within the agricultural industry in Cambodia to support local farmers.
Developing a “Recycled products from waste” to contribute to climate change
The recycling coffee waste into mashroom cutivation, used as a substrate for the production of the edible mushroom Pleurotus pulmonarius, a high protein content product (17.8% ± 0.84%). The spent mushroom substrate (SMS) resulting from fungus production showed a decrease in lignin (49.7% ± 12%), cellulose (33.7% ± 10.8%), and phenolic compound (87% ± 2%) content, which avoids contamination of soil and water bodies by them. Since the SMS still contains N (2.45%), P (0.20%), K (0.112%), Ca (0.320%), and Mg (0.106%), it has the potential to be used as a raw material in the production of a biofertilizer. This model reduces the environmental impact of the byproducts generated by small coffee growers and constitutes an alternative to combat hunger in rural communities and to achieve the sustainable development goal of zero hunger proposed by the United Nations.
The goal is to create a balancing an agro-ecosystem and protect biodiversity.
- Income generation for low-income farmer and women micro-coffee shop
(We give all our stakeholders a sustainable income by recycling coffee waste into biochar to improve coffee supply chain)
- Improved supply chain management
( Biochar into biofertilizer from coffee waste can improve soil characteristics, especially of tropical soils, to achieve higher yields and save money through reducing the use of expensive and scarce fertilizer.
- Climate change adaptation and mitigation
(Biochar can reduce CO2 emission as it is estimated that storing carbon in biochar avoids the emission of 0.1–0.3 billion tons of CO2 annually.)