Three weeks ago, they dealt the final blow, spraying the area with glyphosate weedkiller and instantly terminating the farm's organic status.
He had four hectares of the green-leaved shrub, enough to provide a living for his family of seven.That was until the weekend in mid-February when the police helicopters arrived, escorting a crop-duster that swooped low over the fields and sprayed the coca with glyphosate, a powerful agricultural weedkiller.
Under Plan Colombia, the spraying of coca fields with weedkiller has been stepped up.
Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president, has championed aerial spraying of coca fields with weedkiller.
American and Colombian officials insist that Roundup, the glyphosate-based weedkiller made by Monsanto that they spray, is harmless and is widely used on American farms.
We have come to the district of Balboa, in Cauca department, to watch a government effort to eradicate coca, the shrub from which cocaine is extracted.For several years Álvaro Uribe's government, with American aid and contractors, has used crop-spraying light aircraft to dump weedkiller on coca fields.
Still less can the country be made safe and prosperous by the policy of spraying weedkiller on coca crops a futile exercise that has failed to staunch the flow of cocaine to the United States and has alienated large numbers of peasants.
Roundup is still a leading brand, but margins have been eroded by competition from Chinese producers of other forms of glyphosate weedkiller.
Mr Uribe has allowed the Americans to dump massive quantities of weedkiller on his country's coca plantations.
For the past 15 years or so Colombia has used crop-dusting planes operated by American contractors to spray around 130,000 hectares (321,000 acres) a year of its land with glyphosate, a powerful weedkiller, in an attempt to wipe out the coca crop that provides the raw material for cocaine.
One is that the weedkiller destroys the food crops of the coca farmers, and may damage human health.
