Today we visited Santa Maria de Dota, a cooperative community of coffee farms working together to become successful in the coffee industry.  Out of the 900 coffee producers which make up Dota, almost all of them are small coffee farms owns and operated by a family.  This holds several advantages for those small farms which are apart of the community, as they can share expertise and work together to export large quantities of their coffee.  While individual, small farms have a pretty limited, small role in the coffee industry due to lack of land or resources, when put together to form Dota they can heavily influence the future of the industry by controlling much of the market.  The community of Dota elects a council of 15 people to make day to day administrative decisions and have a full assembly of the 900 groups of Dota annually.  Through this democratic process, small farms are able to have more of an impact on the regulations or major decisions which are made in the coffee industry.

They are also a few negatives to working as a cooperative company instead of individual.  For example, each of the small farms has to pay to send their product to a central location and they have less control over the exportation of it.  Working as a cooperative company in general gives individual farms less control over just about every area of the supply chain except for the creation of coffee beans.  As a result, a small farm which is a member of Santa Maria de Dota does not control their own clients or process of selling their product.  Still, being a member of such cooperatives gives incentive to the smaller farms to achieve certificates, such as the carbon neutral certificate or coffee bean quality certificate, which makes the farms better overall.  Without the cooperative, the community of coffee farms know as Santa Maria de Dota would change entirely, as the farms would be fueled by competition instead of a desire to succeed together.  I have no doubts that indeed of over 900 farms coexisting and working successfully together, there would be much fewer, but large farms.  The farms which could not compete with the larger ones would be teared down, instead of helped to succeed.  The cooperative not only allows the companies to work together, but also make each of the farms better individually.