Last month we had the delight of hosting Tesfaye Bekele and Genet Shibru from Suke Quto in Ethiopia, and Wim van Kooten from Trabocca in Amsterdam. This visit had been some time in the making, and we were really pleased it could happen.
Tesfaye and Genet were with us for three days. We showed them how we roast their coffee and make and sell it in our shops. We caught up with the work they are doing on the farm and tasted through the new crop coffees from Suke Quto before a staff meeting where Tesfaye and Wim talked to us about all things Suke Quto and Ethiopian coffee generally.
Trabocca are the importers that help us ship coffee from Suke Quto. They introduced us to Tesfaye’s coffee and help to export the coffee to us in the UK. We have mentioned the great work that Trabocca do before, essentially helping us buy with transparency and consistency in quality in Ethiopia and Kenya. Tesfaye also told us of the work Trabocca do in Ethiopia, helping him and other farmers with specific projects to increase and maintain the coffee quality.
The real highlight of the meeting was hearing first hand Tesfaye’s journey into coffee farming and the continuation of the work he is doing. We visit Tesfaye fairly regularly, but that is usually just one or two of us; Tesfaye captivated the whole team with his story and urged us to continue with the work that we are doing to get his coffee to our customers. Tesfaye does not call himself a coffee farmer, and it is not his life’s purpose. He proclaims ‘I am not born for coffee; I am born for nature. If I have nature, I have coffee.’
Tesfaye was trained and works in Natural Resource Management (Forestry) for the Ethiopian government and fell into coffee farming as a means to help replant native forest and secure an income for the people in the Guji area after three years of significant forest fires in the late 1990s. Tesfaye, with the help of local government, organised the replanting of native trees, along with coffee to provide a future income for the local area. The coffee seedlings selected were also indigenous to the area. The local farmers were reluctant to take on the coffee though – income would be too slow to arrive (three to four years before a crop) and coffee is labour intensive. So, in the early 2000s Tesfaye and Genet set out a plan to establish a model coffee farm to help show that coffee was a viable crop and would also help restore the forest lost in the fires. This was the beginning of Suke Quto.
In 2007 Tesfaye found himself with three containers of coffee to sell and knew he would need international buyers to make the project work. He set about researching and contacting everyone he could about his coffee and sending samples. Solberg and Hansen (a large and older-than-us roaster in Norway) and Trabocca were his first customers, and through their initial support, Tesfaye was able to grow Suke Quto, while providing coffee and shade-tree seedlings to small-holding farmers. We have had coffee from Suke Quto on our counter and in our Organic Espresso since 2016.
We learned a great deal from Tesfaye over the evening and after twenty harvests as a coffee producer he says he is still ‘nature first’.
Monmouth x
