Shiferaw Gelgele Tero grows coffee on his 3.8 hectare farm in the Chelbesa community, located in the south-eastern corner of the coveted Gedeo Zone-- the narrow section of plateau dense with savvy farmers whose coffee is known as “Yirgacheffe”. This more remote corner of the Gedeo plateau centers its commerce around the trading city of Gedeb, a bustling outpost that links commerce between Gedeo and Guji zones, and, it must be mentioned, produces some of the most beautifully perfumed and candy-like natural coffees one can find in all of Ethiopia. The communities surrounding Gedeb reach some of the highest growing elevations for coffee in the world, and are a truly enchanting part of the long drive into Guji. In addition to coffee Shiferaw grows common subsistence and local market crops like beans, cabbage, and enset, a fruit-less relative of the banana tree whose inner pulp is packed into cakes and fermented underground, and eaten as a staple starch year round.
This is the first year we have featured Shiferaw’s coffee as a part of the Single Farmer Lots Program. Coffee is Shiferaw’s main source of income that he uses to support his family. Ripe cherries for this natural processed coffee were carefully hand sorted and floated to remove less dense coffee beans before drying on raised beds for 15-21 days. Beds are carefully constructed to ensure proper air circulation and temperature control, for optimal drying. During processing, cherries are often covered during the afternoons—a very characteristic technique of southern Gedeo, where the midday sun is searingly intense. Once the cherries finished drying to the necessary 11 percent moisture, they were transported to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to be milled and prepared for export through the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, the umbrella organization that oversees Shiferaw’s local Chelbesa cooperative. About Royal’s Single Farmer Lots Program: The creation of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in 2008 significantly limited farm-level traceability. The Exchange instituted a nationalized system of purely empirical quality analysis. This was achieved by anonymizing coffee deliveries to government-run sensory analysis hubs throughout the country. In these labs, samples would be cupped and the entire lot would then be profiled by region and grade only, for internal auction to exporters. Where all of this backfired was in relationship markets: longtime microlot buyers, like Royal, could risk losing access to very established producer partnerships as their coffees were blinded in the Exchange; and, enterprising coops, unable to show their coffees directly to buyers, found it more difficult to find their coffees a consistent home for the highest value.
In response, Royal, with support from select cooperative unions, led the formation of the Single Farmer Lots Program. The goal was to break off single farmers’ coffees from the larger cooperative blends sold through the ECX, taking custody of these precious coffees through a direct sale. The program is a unique micro-channel of almost unprecedented specificity in coffee supply from Ethiopia. Farmers with the drive and means to sell direct are supported by Royal, and, in turn, our most enthusiastic buyers of Ethiopia coffee have access to a portfolio of single-farm lots, un-diluted by the typical cooperative- and exporter-level consolidations. The Single Farmer Lots Program represents a very sweet end to a chaotic recent chapter in Ethiopia’s coffee history, and we think it’s a model for what ought to be a generation of start-up relationship farming in Ethiopia’s world-famous southern zones.
