Ela Farda is in West Guji zone, just outside of southern Yirgacheffe. With a terroir very similar to Gedeb and Kochere districts, coffee from this area is known for its gifted processing climate and experienced growers. Washed and natural coffees alike from this area tend to be sweet and crisp, ranging from clean acidic fruits to jammy or herbal concentrated sweetness. Ela Farda is one of many primary organic certified cooperatives that make up the Oromia Coffee Farmers Coorperative Union (OCFCU), one of Ethiopia’s largest exporter groups.
West Guji and Its Coffee
West Guji zone, along with much of the Yirgacheffee region to the north and east, is a remote area with high elevations. This area was previously a part of the Guji and Borena zones and was formulated from a combination of territory from each one. Processing sites operate identically here to those of Yirgacheffe and Guji, with rigorous attention to detail and often fierce competition for membership and/or cherry procurement by processors.
Being a part of Ethiopia’s vast and complex Oromia region, West Guji zone has numerous cooperatives here with registered farmer members that are a part of the Oromia Union, one of Ethiopia’s largest export entities.
Ela Farda and Processing
Farmer members contributing to Ela Farda are quintessential remote Ethiopian family farms. Most are small by global standards, but large for Ethiopia: the coop has 350 member families farming a collective 732 hectrares, more than 2 hectares apiece. Farms are for the most part forested and diverse, with production typically divided between spacious, lofty coffee trees, other fruits or legumes, and enset, a fruitless cousin of the banana plant whose pulp is packed into cakes, fermented underground, and then toasted as a staple starch. This common pair of crops satisfies unique and separate needs: coffee for economic livelihood; and enset for nutrition.
Washed coffee is produced very straightforwardly at the coop. Cherry is picked daily during harvest and delivered to the coop by individual farmers. All cherry is sorted on arrival for imperfections and uniform ripeness. Coffee is depulped and fermented overnight in open tanks, and then washed clean and soaked in fresh water before being transferred to the raised drying tables. The parchment coffee dries in the sun for an average of 2 weeks, after which it is brought into the local warehouse for storage, prior to being transported to Addis Ababa for final dry milling and export.
Oromia Farmers Cooperative Union
The Oromia Regional State is Ethiopia’s largest, including more than 110,000 square miles and 35 million people. It touches the borders of both Kenya to the south and South Sudan to the west, and includes Ethiopia’s massive capital city, Addis Ababa, along with 65% of Ethiopia coffee growing territory, as of 2014. There are a number of famous coffee regions included in full or in part in Oromia: Jimma and Illubabor in the west; Harar to the northeast; Arsi, bordering Sidama in the mid-south, which produces many similar terroirs; and the Guji Zone, where Royal also works with a diversity of forward-thinking growers and processors.
The Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU) is an umbrella organization established in 1999 by 34 individual cooperatives interested in centralizing resources and gaining leverage in the export market.
As of 2020, OCFCU supports more than 400 individual cooperatives--more than 400,000 households, by far the largest unionization of farmers in the country. 70% of profits from coffee exports are returned directly to member cooperatives, who in turn share their own portion directly with farmers. The union also funds organic farming programs, mill equipment purchases, and food security programs. OCFCU has established a central cupping lab to support quality control and is a founding shareholder in its members’ bank, the Cooperative Bank of Oromia, that provides pre-harvest financing and crop insurance; both resources historically unavailable to rural farmers in Ethiopia.
OCFCU has been Fairtrade and Organic certified since 2002, and has ever since been one of the world’s largest suppliers of Fairtrade coffee.
