If you're a roaster, you've probably felt it. It's getting harder and harder to find great quality coffee at volumes and prices that still make sense. One origin that's often been overlooked in the search is Honduras. For years, it's been treated as a conventional origin, even though there are producers quietly growing exceptional coffees that never make it into the specialty conversation.
The Honduran Coffee Alliance is a social enterprise with a simple mission. Connect those producers and buyers in a fair, sustainable, and commercially viable way. They work with organized producer groups across regions like El Paraiso, La Paz, Olancho, and Comoyagua, helping them evaluate quality, tell their farm stories, and move coffees that belong on specialty menus, not buried in anonymous blends. What that looks like for roasters is previously untapped lots that heat your flavour and quality targets, a minimum of just four bags to get started, transparency reports so everyone can see where every cent of the purchase goes, and turning that first buy into a long-term trade relationship, not just a one-off.
If the idea of forming a long-term relationship with producers in Honduras is of interest to you, reach out to the Honduran Coffee Alliance so that they can work to find you a fit for your 2026 menu. Samples are going to be ready soon. You'll find Sean Warner's WhatsApp and email in the show notes. Send him a message and tell him you heard about the Honduran Coffee Alliance here, and start exploring what these overlooked Honduran coffees could do for your menu today.
Check the show notes for links. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map of Ford Friends. I'm your host Lee Safar, and this is episode three of a wonderful five-part series. With first-time guest Tony Farmer, and Tony, Tony, this will absolutely not be the last time that you come on the podcast.
This has been a delightful conversation, and I'm looking forward to having you back every year. I'm keen to keep tracking this subject over a generative ag, not just from a coffee perspective, but from a food supply perspective. We're talking about the evidence for regenerative agriculture. In the last episode, we were talking about global geopolitical constraints and what impact they're having on the food supply chain.
In this episode, we're going to talk about the urgency of food security. I want to start with Liberation Day, because Liberation Day seemed to be quite the wake-up call for particularly farmers all over the world, but more particularly for American farmers. Liberation Day, for those who don't know, was the day that Trump decided he was going to say, fuck you, to all the, in Trump's way, to all the governments around the world who he didn't think were doing fair trade with America, and he was going to enforce reciprocal tariffs. And there were some governments around the world that turned around and said, fuck you back, and said, we're not going to buy soybeans from your farmers.
We're not going to do, you want reciprocal trade, we're going to give you a reciprocal trade. If you're not going to buy from us, we're not going to buy from you. Now, do you want to talk a little bit about what that did to the farmers in America? What actually speeds that, because a few days in office, he complained about the USMCA agreement, which was the free trade agreement between North America, so he's been after that, and he said we were getting our faces ripped off, but that was very hard for me to understand, because he crafted and signed that document, that trade agreement.
What do you mean, he was being hypocritical? I'm not sure what you're talking about there. What he really seems to be upset about, I mean, again, I am not in his head, but what he seems to be upset about is the idea that other, we were buying more from other countries than they were buying from us on any level, and he viewed tariffs as a way to figure that and so tariffs can be a tool to fix that, right? So let's say I'm ordering steak knives from a company in Canada, and I'm all the companies in the United States that make steak knives are like, well, I can't sell them because Canada is doing it cheaper.
So you tear up the steak knives from Canada, it benefits the American citizens. That was the idea, but they were applied. I don't know the right word to use. Actually, there is a right.
Usually they were applied without what seemed to be an understanding of how much, how incredibly intertwined these two countries are, and much more harm was to come from us, because Canada and Mexico are our biggest customers. They're our biggest customers. So you might have helped some companies, but you hurt a whole lot of others. Like we've practically destroyed, I think, the whiskey market in the South, because Canada was by far the largest buyer of American whiskey, and they're just, they're out of business.
It's not because of Canada's, Canada doesn't play. We learn. Canada bound together and was like, nope, we will suffer before we buy anything with an American label on it. But we also shot ourselves in the split because Canada supplies probably 80% of our potassium, which is a macronutrient in agriculture.
It's not a nice to have. You must have nitrogen potassium and phosphorus to grow crops. And so there was a tariff on that. And it was like no one was paying attention.
It was like no one was talking to each other. I think the head of Ag whose book Rollins did have a bunch of meetings, and then suddenly they weren't terrafing pertassium any longer. But I mean, they were terrafing everything. I was like lumber went through the roof and some and food.
We import about 60% of our fruits and vegetables from Mexico and Canada. So terrafing, all of that. And I would love to tell you what is being terrafinged right now and what is not. I had to stop tracking that because it was changing every day.
I put up a video and I would time it to come up the next morning at like five a.m. And by the time the video went live, it was zero, like that's not true anymore. And I'm like, what's true when I made the video? So that caused a spike in fertilizer, which started a big problem.
Interest rates were already high. So a borrowing was hard for farmers. And then we scared off our major trading partners, as you already mentioned. So China was our major, major buyer of soy, the number one buyer of soy from us.
And they got angry with us. No, the president called these countries names, threatened to annex them, made fun of them, wasn't consistent in his policy or outreach to them. And they did what human beings do. They got angry and they said, we would like to not trade with you.
Now, China is interesting in that, you know, the expression all the time that we play checkers and they play chess is actually pretty accurate. I have to say, watching the way they operate, they think 20, 30, 50 years down the road. And they plan very, very carefully. And right now they will, this is none of this war in Iran is good for them, but they will be less impacted because they have been stockpiling fertilizer for a long time.
And they also had to buy them up arable farmland. So China has 10% of the world's population, 17% and only 10% of the world's arable farmland. So they've been buying farmland all over the world, arable patches of farmland, growing food and shipping it back to the motherland. You can be angry at that all you want.
That's good policy by your government. They're taking care of their citizens. It is. And so we seem to be formed by the seat of our pants, making policy without making policy in a vacuum is what we do, make policy like this.
And then the next day we wake up to the complications and consequences of that. And then we try and shift the policy. And then there's more complications and then we try and shift the policy. And that, I mean, sort of worked, sort of didn't work until Iran where we have now kicked an anthill.
There's not, there's not a way to roll it back versus like, you know, with Canada's example, where I'd say, you know, we pissed Canada off. We really did piss them off. But they also understand how interconnected we are that they need us. We need them.
They were willing to talk, willing to have conversations, willing to like, no one was going to attack each other. And Canada may not be happy with us at all, but they're still, they're still the trading partner with us. No, come to the table. When we, Iran's not even doing that.
Yes. No. So we have kicked an anthill full of iron ants that we have no plan to get out of there. And now that we have, I saw someone interviewing someone on policy from Iran yesterday, it was so fascinating because he was saying that the younger generation in Iran, the 20 somethings, love America, like they love America, pop in our Hollywood and our culture.
And they couldn't understand why their grandparents hated us so much. And this interesting, you just woke an entire generation up who had nothing against us and probably would have turned the violence a little bit, like maybe we like America too. We hate you and you are our enemy now for generations to come. So we have upset that we've upset the world order.
Again, again, not for the first time. But again, I'm sorry. Can I just apologize? Everyone here who's not American, most of us are very, very concerned and unhappy about this.
And we do love our country and we love our democracy and we are shocked. We're shocked and disappointed by much of what is happening right now, everything. And a lot of my American friends continue to apologize. I'm sorry.
I don't agree with our president. I don't like what he's doing. And I think that a lot of people understand that Americans love their country. The part that people are confused with is that it seems to be that the American president and a lot of American people believe that America's needs should come at the expense and no matter what the expense of other countries and their agency.
And that's the part that people really struggle with. That's not the American people's fault. But what is happening right now is from everything that I can see as a global citizen, the consequences of that bombastic approach with him kicking the hornet's nest in Iran. If you think China was playing 3D chess, I think Iran's playing 4D chess because they've been preparing for this moment for 40 years.
And now that it's happened, and this is where I want to talk about food security because Iran's not just playing this war from a military perspective. They are fucking with the economics of the world. Yes. And they know what they're doing.
Absolutely. And China is an ally of theirs. And Russia is an ally of theirs. So I wanted to gain this out a little bit with you if you don't mind.
How urgent is the food security situation going to get? Because I feel like that person that's calling out the dragon is coming, the dragon is coming, the dragon is coming. And people are like, what do you mean? And I'm like, we're in a situation where our farmers can't grow our food.
None of us eat unless we're growing food in our backyard because they are the people. We go to the supermarket. And if countries feel like they can no longer trade with the countries that we live in because it's too geopolitically tense and there's a world war, they're going to stop exporting. I live in a country, even though I'm in Australia at the moment, I live in a country in the United Arab Emirates.
Where we import the majority of our produce from Lebanon and Iran, what the fuck do people think is going to happen from there, given that both those countries are being bombed by Israel and America right now? Food security is directly tied to geopolitical tensions, as well as the issue of climate and what we've done to our soil. And that's why I must stand it. Go ahead, please.
Most of us believe in diplomacy. You know, most of us are passionate about diplomacy and build up. But the United States had for all our bomb after behavior, we also had the wildly, wildly generous in U.S. aid around the world.
But that was because of the extractionist nature, right? America has been quite... It's true. And so USAID, and I was told by an American who has a non-profit, and I said to her, listen, you've got to explain to me why so many people go into being going to non-profits.
Like, isn't it all a ruse? And she said to me, Lee, I'm trying to correct some of the extractionist bullshit our government has done and inflicted on nations around the world. And she started to explain it to me. I'm like, okay, now I get it.
USAID is part of it. Go ahead, please. It is. But it's also soft diplomacy, right?
Right. So we buy goodwill and we should. And the idea that conversation, understanding the complexity of our global interconnectedness and having conversations and controlling the live wires, like for years and years and years was how do we control North Korea? How do we keep Iran calm if they are building up nuclear?
And those systems work most of the time, and then we just blown them up. We have abandoned diplomacy, both soft diplomacy and higher level. Like, I don't know what the secretary of state, what is he possibly conversing with people over when Trump may wake up on any given morning and make a decision to attack or bomb or annex Greenland or, you know, I don't know that he even shares his plans. So it makes us wildly unpredictable.
But we are self-centered. I admit it. And I talk about it a lot in the classroom. I talk about it a lot in the classroom.
Not how can you do that. Yeah. A very, very US centric. They don't know.
This is so embarrassing. My undergrads can, many of them cannot find anything on the map of the world. They could not find England on a map of the world. They couldn't find India.
They know nothing about any other country because when you're the rich bully on the street, as we have been, like maybe if you're the rich and powerful good guy or the rich and powerful bad guy, you don't really have to pay attention to anybody else because everyone comes to you. And we built this really fascinating, the world that was fascinated with American culture, right? So we made a lot of money and we put a lot of music and entertainment and product and attitude into the world. And everywhere that I travel in the world, when I travel internationally, what do they want to do?
Everyone wants to go to New York City. Oh, we're dying to visit the United States for the first time. We get very complacent. And so I say to my students all the time, you cannot afford to be a U.S.
centric in these conversations. We are part of a global system. I tell them you need to read the financial times, you need to read global news, read Al Jazeera, understand how we are connected. And we just ran out of time.
So we didn't want to say both policy-wise, both policy-wise by the decisions of the president. And also, we just, we ran out of runway. We no longer have the attention of the world in that way. We no longer have the goodwill of whatever goodwill we have.
We don't have that any longer. And we still are focused on ourselves. They are still focused on how it impacts us. And why can't this, why won't this, why won't Greenland just roll over and join us?
Why won't Canada just join us? You can't write this. There's people that you can't. So it's our time.
Like we are not the top dog any longer. And we're going to find out what it's like to have other countries not care what you think, not care that you are the most important client. They are finding other ways really fast to meet their needs. And then other countries are stepping up.
They see the opening. They're not stupid. And they're going, if we could figure out how to grow this or produce this. And they're doing it.
Have you seen all these? All these global contracts getting signed on for chip technology and are manufacturing in other countries because they stepped into our vacuum. You want to do what the US? Well, what?
And Liberation Day kicked all of that off. Liberation Day was the real wake up call where people turned around and said, COVID was important because people, we had this reverse, I think they were calling it de-globalization. People realized that supply chains needed to come back home because the amount of trade that people were doing were creating a problem in, we had problem with logistics and couldn't find containers, etc, etc. And so that was kind of a soft version of that.
Liberation Day really made that very US centric. And my concern is for the American people. But on a global level is that if people are no longer going to trade with America, and we're not using regenerative practices to grow food, we are going to drive our farmers into bankruptcy all over the world, but particularly in America. And they're not going to grow the food, which is going, if you're not trading with countries and you're not growing your own food, we have a major food security issue within America.
And then what happens is ultra-processed nutrient devoid of food. But you still need corn and sugar to create that ultra-processed food. My favorite example that I warn people about is Costco. So Costco's a beloved company here and they were very good.
They're employees. When blueberry, so two years ago, we had the entire crop in cereal blueberries. We lost it to drought and they produced about a third of the world blueberry. So blueberry, price by rocket, sky rocket.
And everybody was looking for like, oh my god, we were going to do it. And some companies just stopped making blueberry muffins. Costco was famous for their blueberry muffins. People buy them in big trays and they take them to parties or to big breakfast or whatever.
And so this is what they did. Because you're going to see this repeated over and over and over again. They pulled the product. They rejiggered the recipe and asked themselves, how could we continue to make this at the same price?
Well, let's take the blueberries out and replace it with a cream cheese. That's got an artificial blueberry flavor and artificial blue color. And we'll call them blueberry cream cheese muffins or blueberry cream muffins. And then they put that back on the market.
And guess what? It tasted delicious because doesn't that sound delicious? But the only thing that was healthy in there was the blueberries. And so we're already, we're also seeing companies like Mars.
Yeah, they're looking for ways to use filler for their candy because every company is going to be doing this. And the impact will not be healthier food. It will be worse. My husband uses the term in stratification.
Get that book. If anybody, there's a book out called in stratification, it is fantastic. Anyway, go ahead. Someone needs to write that.
So we're going to see our food system right at the moment when Americans are suddenly making up and going, wow, we need to stop eating so much processed food. That is going to double down on that. At the same time, everyone's starting to grow their own gardens, but we can't feed each other. We can't be ourselves out of our gardens.
We tried that during World War II. We grew about 40 to 50% of our fresh produce. We did that, yay, that's a win, but it was hard. And it wasn't, I tell people, it takes like 10 square feet to grow enough wheat to make one loaf of bread.
So most of your diet is not fruits and vegetables. It is corn, soy, wheat, sugar, and rice. You cannot grow that to feed your family. You need to have giant farms for that.
So we have to protect our farms for that. And I'm worried right now that we're seeing a massive consolidation of farms because as a farm goes under, someone buys it and it either becomes a strip center or it becomes shopping or housing and we call that the last crop in agriculture. You're not growing anything there again. And then sometimes it sits idle.
It depends on the area. If it's a very poor area, maybe no one around them can afford that property. It's its idle and it's very bad for the economy because then you're picking jobs and income out. More often what's happening is it's getting purchased some cases by a foreign country, but that's not my biggest concern.
It's purchased by larger farms. You can afford it and they're consolidating to larger and larger and larger farms. And I have some followers on my social media accounts that are like, I don't understand what the problem is. When that'd be more efficient, I'm like, no, you don't want your entire food system controlled by a few companies.
That has never, ever been net positive for us, ever. There is international use by diversity. They're entering to shareholders, which are constantly looking for better margins. They are not looking to make your food healthy.
They are adding more chemicals. They are never going to lean into regenerative agriculture, no matter what it means. And no matter how healthy the food gets, that's not what they're driven by. In the next episode, guys, we're going to listen to the barriers to regenerative agriculture and we'll pick up the conversation where we left it off.
So join us for the fourth episode of this really wonderful discussion with Tony Fama. Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting my beforeward our guests and advertisers on social media.
Subscribe, hit the like button, leave a comment and share this episode with a friend. If you'd like to support our work more directly, become a paid premium YouTube subscriber or Patreon backer. To get early access to the show, add free directly to your inbox each week. You can find links in the show notes.