San Vicente Cooperative Votes to Admit Five New Farms After Two-Year Review

The Cooperative Council in San Vicente voted Monday to admit five smallholder farms to membership, ending a two-year application and review cycle. The farms—three coffee operations in the interior hills and two yerba mate growers near the Río Esperanto—will gain access to the cooperative's shared processing equipment and its direct-sale channels to the federal exchange. The decision reflects growing confidence among Tierra Verde's farming families in the cooperative model, even as delays in federal registration continue to slow the admission of new members.

Council members spent eighteen months interviewing the applicants and reviewing their land deeds, soil samples, and harvest records. Two of the farms had initially been held pending clarification of boundary disputes with neighbouring properties; those disputes were resolved through the Tierra Verde Assembly's land-registration office in May. The other three farms met all criteria on first review but waited in queue as the Council processed a backlog of earlier applications.

The new members will begin paying dues in July and will be eligible to vote on cooperative business in October. Their combined annual harvest—roughly eighty tonnes of coffee and thirty-five tonnes of yerba mate—will add measurably to the cooperative's processing volume, though the Council acknowledged that federal infrastructure priorities continue to favour urban ports over rural silos.