“We know that our quality is good, but prices for us have been so bad. We are thankful for your company coming here. Before you, we never saw our buyers. This is the difference, now we have you here, to meet, and to share.”
The Sidama Farmers Cooperative Union
Mr. Lema Legide and his daughter Fasika Lema underneath the shade of their coffee trees. Photo: Ben Corey-Moran, 2008
The view from the mountains into the Great Rift Valley below. Photo: Ben Corey-Moran, 2008
High in the mountains of southern Ethiopia, the farmers of the Sidama Farmers Cooperative Union (SFCU) grow one of the world’s most spectacular, ancient, and prized coffees. This is the birthplace of coffee, a small tree native to these subtropical mountain forests. Here, climate combines with geography, elevation, and ecology to provide the ideal growing conditions for heirloom Arabica varietals.
Organized into hundreds of village-based cooperatives, the SFCU represents over ninety thousand farming families, making it one of the largest coffee cooperatives in the world. On their small farms, the members of SFCU grow coffee surrounded by plantains, mangos, and feathery acacia trees.
We work with the SFCU and the Hache Primary Society—one of the smaller local cooperatives with a membership of just over two thousand farmers—to source our sun-dried natural coffee. Unlike most exported Ethiopian coffee, which is “wet processed”, the naturally processed coffee is produced by drying the fruit of the coffee cherry on to the bean, producing a sweet, syrupy, and wine-like flavor. The Hache Cooperative is located deep in the Bensa region, at one of the highest elevations in the area.