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Mexican Green Coffee
With seeds from the Caribbean, cultivation began in Veracruz, where custom house records indicate a few hundred bags of coffee were exported as early as 1802. But these exports were apparently anomalous because after 1805 coffee would not be exported again for twenty years, after the war of independence. Production did increase over this period, presumably for domestic trade and consumption. In 1817, a planter named Don Juan Antonio Gomez started “intensive cultivation” further south, where coffee thrived at high altitudes. By 1826 there were half a million trees in Cordoba and Mexican coffee was being exported. In 1828, seeds—or possibly plants—from Arabia (Yemen) were planted in Uruapan, near the Pacific coast west of Mexico City, by Jose Mariano Michelena. Trees were brought from Guatemala to be planted in the southern state of Chiapas in 1847, and Oaxaca would become the third largest producer of Mexican coffee by 1889.