The post Yerba Madre’s Important Work Of Prioritizing Farmer Welfare Through Regenerative Yerba Mate appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Regenerative yerba mate nursery in Misiones Province, Argentina photo by author Over the past 30 years, Yerba Madre, formerly Guayakí, created an independent supply chain of Regenerative Organic Certified yerba mate. It’s been doing it decades before the certification was even established. As Christopher Gergen, CEO of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, says, “Guayakí is the OG.” Yerba Madre was always a mission-driven business that used the native South American plant to grow shade-grown yerba mate as a way to reforest and regenerate the Atlantic Rainforest, while providing welfare to the farmers doing the work on the ground. It did that by introducing the cultural herbal beverage to a new market in the US. About six years into its business, Guayakí needed a lot more yerba mate than any one partner (In this case, Paraguay’s Aché Kue Tuvy tribe) can supply. “We were buying virtually the only shade-grown organic mate that existed on the planet,” Yerba Madre cofounder Steven Karr tells me. But with very few options to source yerba mate that was shade-grown–a non-negotiable–its founders built a network of farmers to begin transitioning their farms from conventional agriculture to regenerative and worked with indigenous tribes to build out regenerative yerba mate farms for them. These are long-term projects. It takes about five years to grow yerba mate that’s ready for an initial harvest, and much longer for a farm to become 100% shade-grown. “We’re not good as a global society of saying, ‘you have to work your butt off right now, but trust me, it’ll work for you in the long term,’” Yerba Madre CEO Ben Mand says. “It takes a special kind of person to have that belief.” Yerba Madre now works with more than 250 families from Indigenous peoples and local communities, across 42 farms and four Indigenous…

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Filed under: News - @ May 1, 2025 11:25 am