Sustainability
La Grama has always paid special attention to workplace welfare, which unfortunately is very uncommon in Peru’s rural areas. Working with local communities, we have formed a great team that is nearly equally composed of male and female workers, which together with our growers, are constantly encouraged to excel at their jobs and achieve a better quality of life.
Having generated over 280 direct jobs and around 3000 indirect jobs over the years, many families around the country have benefited by joining our team, not only by paying fair salaries, but also by offering financial help programs for the education of our personnel, and provide benefits that have never been offered to them before, such as health insurance, retirement funds, and paid vacations.
Teaching and sharing values with our workers and growers has been a priority, as we strongly believe that knowledge is a form of empowerment. They have learned to use the financial system, the value of savings, access to credit and invest in their children’s education. For the women in our workplace, it is especially important that we take care of them as domestic violence is quite common in the areas we operate; therefore, by gaining financial independence and growth opportunities, they are able to bring themselves and their children out of the cycle of poverty.
+750
Organic Hectares
+290
Small Scale Farmers
+280
Employees
15
Certificates
We give our growers constant technical assistance for free, helping them to improve their farming skills, obtain higher yields with better quality and, therefore, gaining greater profits. By teaching our farmers to grow their crops organically and with the best agricultural practices, not only protects them, their families, and the environment from toxic pesticides, but also makes them less dependable on external farming inputs, use cheaper local resources, and, therefore, make their farms more sustainable. Additionally, organic farming has allowed them to access international markets that value organic (compared to the local market where organic consumption is still insignificant). Therefore, our farmers can receive better prices to invest not only in their farms but also in their families and improve their quality of life.
Around 95% of the volume we export comes from our growers. The remaining 5% comes from La Grama’s own farm, which operates under biodynamic principles and is used to experiment with all sorts of organic farming techniques in order to select the best ones for our farmers to apply on their own lands. One example is agroforestry, which has shown to have a great impact, improving cropping conditions, environmental conservation, and farmer’s income.