Maria Farahani has always known coffee. The co-founder of Fara Coffee, an Austin-based roaster since 2004, and its philanthropic sister organization Fara Foundation, Farahani comes from a long line of coffee farmers in Nicaragua, where her family has owned the Santa Rita coffee farm for generations.
“My husband and I own a farm that was my grandfather’s, and then it was my uncle’s, and then we purchased it from him. We’re still harvesting on the same farm where we’ve been harvesting for a hundred years,” Farahani says. “This is something my ancestors have done for a long time, and I guess I have accidentally fallen into their footsteps.”
She says “accidentally” because, though coffee farming runs in both sides of her family, Farahani wasn’t always interested in continuing the tradition. She was just 18 when she moved across the continent from her hometown of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, to study Latin American literature at UT Austin’s College of Liberal Arts.
It was during her studies at UT that Maria, then Maria Cisne, met her husband, Manouchehr “Manny” Farahani. After finishing their degrees in 1978, the young couple initially went their different ways. Manny returned to his home country of Iran while Maria remained in Texas. Then, in 1979, Maria went to visit Manny and fell in love with Iran. She moved to the country full-time a year later, and the couple were married just four days before the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. They stayed in the country through the early years of the conflict, but by 1986 they knew it was time to leave, and the Farahanis moved back to Central Texas.
Once in Austin again, Manny began to work in real estate projects around the city, and it was ultimately his interest in real estate that led the couple to found Fara Coffee — despite Maria’s initial attempts to dissuade him. On one visit to Nicaragua after the couple’s return to the U.S., Manny grew enamored by the beauty of the country’s lush coffee farms and wanted to buy one. He was excited by the prospect of trying something new, Maria says, but she was all too familiar with the reality of the work, which is difficult, involved, and very labor-intensive, as all of the coffee in Nicaragua is hand-picked. Manny’s mind was set, however, and they purchased a farm in the early 90s.
“I tried to discourage him, but God had other plans,” Maria chuckles.
Since that initial acquisition, the Farahani’s business has expanded significantly. Fara Coffee now owns and operates three farms in the Matagalpa, Nicaragua, area — including Santa Rita, the original family farm — and roasts its specialty Arabica beans at an in-house facility in Austin. The final product is available throughout the Central Texas area and across the southern United States.
As their business has grown, so too has the Farahanis’ commitment to their Nicaraguan community. Through its sister nonprofit, the Fara Foundation, Fara Coffee puts its proceeds to work assisting Matagalpa families with education, elder care, food, and medical assistance needs. The Farahanis are also committed to protecting the Nicaraguan environment by maintaining sustainable practices on their farms, Maria says.
“When you’re in charge of the people and land, you have to be a good steward of both,” she says. “You have to be a good steward of the people that you are blessed to have around you.”
The beans that become Fara Coffee are all shade-grown, Maria says, which helps keep the local environment intact and offers a thriving habitat for native flora and fauna. The Farahanis’ farms are also proudly Rainforest Alliance certified, reflecting their efforts to both meet rigorous environmental standards and meet various sustainability commitments.
But growing clean and delicious coffee beans is just one piece of the Fara Coffee project; just as important are the people that harvest, process, and roast that coffee. In Nicaragua, the Farahanis’ farms provide jobs for local community members, Maria says, who gather to hand-pick the coffee crop. The work itself becomes a kind of community building: Even when harvesting bleeds into weekends, members of a nearby church will head over to pick coffee together.
The connection between Fara Coffee and its Nicaraguan community runs two ways: Community workers care for the coffee, and Fara Foundation cares for the community. The foundation got its start, Maria says, when she and Manny asked her aunt to identify 15 local families in need of assistance. The couple then gave each family a monthly canasta básica — a basket of basic, non-perishable food items like rice, corn, oil and sugar. Soon the program expanded to serve hundreds of families and disabled members of the community.
From an extensive network of canastas básicas to fulfilling wish-lists for local schools, the Fara Foundation has grown to perform a wide scope of philanthropic work. Maria’s greatest pride comes in the form of Fara Clinic, founded by the Farahanis in 2010 after they learned that cervical cancer is the leading cause of death for women ages 30-60 in Nicaragua. The couple soon purchased a building and remodeled part of it into a clinic to detect and prevent cervical cancer at a very low cost — just 30 córdobas, or less than $1, a visit.
“The fee is symbolic,” says Maria. “That way, you don’t rob people of the ownership that they are contributing to their health.”
The foundation has also purchased an ambulance and added a dentist to meet the needs of the community, and since its founding Fara Clinic has reached over 20,000 patients — though Maria says women often bring their children and neglect their own health.
“As women, we are more concerned for our family, our children, than we are about ourselves,” Maria explains. “Very often, we have women who come and ask if the dentist can see their children. We say, ‘Oh, yeah, absolutely. But when was the last time that you were checked? When was the last time you had a pap smear? We’re going to make an appointment for you, and then you can see the dentist too.’”
In addition to its own work, Fara Foundation often partners with doctors and groups from other countries to provide services above and beyond its regular offerings. Specialists in varicose veins from the United States, Canada, Italy and other countries have worked at the Fara Clinic in Matagalpa to treat severe cases of vein insufficiency, for example. Recently the foundation also worked with The House Institute Foundation, an organization treating hearing disorders that brought hearing aids to give to Fara patients for free.
“It’s a very moving experience, to see people hearing for the first time in their lives,” Maria says. “We had this 14-year-old boy who had never had formal sign language and or hearing aids. He had his own kind of sign language that his family and his teacher understood, but he hadn’t had the formal teaching. When that boy could hear, his whole demeanor changed in an instant. It’s like he had gained this power. It was a day full of tears of joy.”
Though the 20 years since Fara Coffee’s founding have been full of growth and change for both the company and its sister foundation, Maria says that when it comes to the future, she and Manny are content with continuing what they do best.
“We hope to be able to continue providing a gourmet quality cup of coffee for a very reasonable price,” she says, “and we hope to continue to serve the people around us that make it possible.”