When he ran out of beans, he teamed up with two other area coffee farmers, Jorge Fonseca and Alejandro Garcia — who also had a coffee shop, the Colibri — and began shipping greater volumes. Suddenly, he was making money.

This D.I.Y. enterprise led to the creation in 2011 of Thrive Farmers Coffee, which Mr. Lander started with Mr. Garcia and Michael Jones, an entrepreneur based in Atlanta. The company is still largely untested, but is built on the idea that farmers can “participate in the added value as coffee moves downstream to the consumer,” Mr. Lander said.

TYPICALLY, farmers sell their green, or unroasted, beans. At that stage, the beans generally fetch a price based on the commodity market price, which in February averaged $1.53 a pound for Arabica coffee, according to the International Coffee Organization.

The fair trade concept offers an improvement on that model. It will pay the market price for beans, but, importantly, it guarantees a minimum price — now $1.40 for Arabica coffee. In addition, the local co-op that collects and processes the beans keeps a premium, now 20 cents, which is used for social services like scholarships and health care for farmers and their families.

Theoretically, a fair trade farmer never loses, because when the commodity market price is higher than the fair trade price, the farmer receives the market price, and the co-op still receives the premium. But fair trade buyers purchase unroasted beans, and the processes that add to the price and value of the coffee come later.

In the system that Thrive is trying to develop, farmers are paid only after their coffee has been exported, packaged and sold — at a much higher price — to retailers. If coffee is sold for, say, $7.25 a pound, Thrive splits the proceeds 50-50 with the farmers, who end up, in that example, with about $3.60 a pound.

The farmers working with Thrive must pay the higher costs of processing and exporting, but Mr. Lander says they net about four times as much as they would through fair trade, once production costs and co-op fees are factored in. And Thrive helps farmers by establishing relationships for the farmers with local coffee processing mills and co-ops. Then, once the beans are shipped to the United States, Thrive takes over, handling packaging, roasting and sales. In some cases, Thrive sells green coffee beans to roasters, in which case the farmer receives 75 percent of the proceeds.