Earlier this year, green coffee beans from Benguet sold for a record ₱9,000 a kilo at the Philippine Quality Coffee Competition (PCQC) 2025.

Rodiyo Tubal Tacdoy from Trinidad, Benguet won first place in the Arabica — Smallholder Farms category. “I’m very happy because before PCQC, I learned everything locally. My knowledge has been upgraded ever since I arrived in Manila because now I’m learning from people on a national scale,” Tacdoy said in Tagalog.

The 22-year-old admits that farming wasn’t his first choice, but coffee farming seems to have chosen him.

“Before we began [planting coffee], we… planted everything. Now, we’re concentrating on coffee,” Tacdoy said, adding that their main crop was sayote, multi-cropped with mostly leafy greens.

Their family first ventured into coffee in 2015, when his grandfather met a Japanese national studying in Benguet State University who was writing a thesis on growing coffee. The student saw promise in the Tacdoy farm because aside from growing conditions favorable to coffee, Tacdoy's grandfather practiced natural farming. They worked together until 2018, but were unable to produce coffee that matched the quality the Japanese national was looking for. Disheartened, Tacdoy’s grandfather returned to multi-cropping, but let his coffee plants be.

A few months later, Tacdoy’s father, Roger, got into a motorcycle accident. Unable to work while recovering, he began to look for ways to make extra cash. He remembered the coffee plants, and asked his father, Tacdoy’s grandfather, for permission to process the harvest, to which the older man agreed. Since it happened to be Tacdoy’s semestral break, his father asked him for help with the project. “I wasn’t interested in coffee yet,” Tacdoy said. “It was just something to do after all the other crops had been harvested."

Around this time, the father and son heard that there was a local coffee competition and decided to join. They ended up winning second place in the La Trinidad Coffee Competition 2019. “It was our first time to process [beans], but my father already had previous knowledge from watching my grandfather.”

After their win, he was approached by an NGO that he declined to name who further trained them in everything “from processing to tasting.”

They entered the competition again in 2021, with his father garnering first place. The next year, they placed fourth. Tacdoy took over in 2023. “I wasn’t doing well with my studies so I had no choice but to go into farming,” he admitted. “I continued my father’s goal and we still process coffee together until now.”

He placed first in the La Trinidad Coffee Competition on his first try. “It was very overwhelming because it was my first time… and I realized that I really did know how to process coffee beans.”

The most challenging part for him is the sensory, or taste, aspect of processing coffee beans. “Taste will depend on the beans’ origin, and I learned that beans from the Cordilleras will taste different from beans from Davao and the Visayas. I learned to upgrade my taste profile and how to approach coffee tasting in general.”

Tacdoy said that their 1.5-hectare farm is no different from many farms in the area, though he adds that he wishes they had more farmhands. “We harvest around 1.5 kilos of cherries [per harvest season]… In the Cordilleras, harvest season is from November to February.”

The whole farm is currently planted to coffee, though there are plans to intercrop with sayote so the latter can provide shade to the coffee and added income to the family. “Single cropping is difficult because there’s no other source of income after the coffee is harvested, so we plan to reintroduce sayote.”

The farm stands 1,500 meters above sea level, with an average temperature of 22 degrees Celsius. “Elevation and origin play parts in how coffee tastes, but most of it is from the way the beans are processed. We use the natural anaerobic process, which is fermentation.”

The sale of Tacdoy’s competition lot at auction at the PCQC was record-breaking on a national scale. ”You can only sell the lot you brought to the competition because a different lot, even using the same process, might taste different.”

He brought 120 kilos, with three kilos used for cupping in the competition, which means that he was able to sell 117 kilos at ₱9,000 per kilo, the highest price paid for local coffee beans to date.

“Our future plans are to help our fellow farmers elevate Cordillera coffee,” Tacdoy said. “Less people want to become coffee farmers. We plan to open a school farm.”

When asked what he thinks will encourage people to go into farming, his answer was simple: money. “Look at the bidding. Now, everyone wants to plant coffee because they’ve realized that bidding can go as high as ₱9,000 a kilo.”