Ethiopia Coffee Farms – TOP 7 Sites

is an organized marketplace, where buyers and sellers come together to trade, assured of quality, quantity, payment, and delivery. The Exchange is jointly governed by private-public Board of Directors
Coffee is a beverage obtained from coffee plant’s fruit called cherry. The coffee plant refers to any type of tree in the genus madder family which is actually a tropical evergreen shrub that has the potential to grow 100 feet tall. Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta are the two most commonly cultivated species of coffee plant having economic significance. Arabica accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s coffee production. Robusta coffee trees represent about 30 percent of the world’s market
The coffee trees grow well in tropical regions with abundant rainfall, year-round warm temperatures with no frost. The coffee tree needs an average temperature between 17° C to 23° C with abundant precipitation and good soil conditions for good growth. The coffee plant produces its first full crop of beans at about 5 years old and then remains productive for about 15 years.

In 2011 we began developing a 500 hectare coffee farm in Gesha, Ethiopia with one vision in mind: to produce the best coffee in the world. After an exhaustive search, the estate location was chosen based on our strict criteria of altitude (1900-2100 MASL), ample rainfall, temperature patterns, rich virgin forest soil, old growth trees, and an existing coffee ecosystem.

Founded in 1975, the Konga Cooperative is located in Yirgacheffe, the most densely populated part of Ethiopia and the country’s leading producer of coffee. It began with a group of 275 women and over 1,000 men and it has since grown to nearly 4,000 members. Compare that to Capucas, one of the most well-known cooperatives in Central America, which has around 300 members.
The reason for this is because in Ethiopia people cannot be landowners. They only have squatting plots which are handed down within families, so an Ethiopian coffee farmer is working a very small area and will typically only produce 1-4 bags of green coffee per season.

is an exporting cooperative with offices in Addis Ababa, and affiliated farmer cooperatives located throughout the coffee growing regions of Ethiopia. Oromia was established in 1999 to facilitate the direct exportation of coffee produced by Ethiopia’s small farmers and assist in marketing, processing and credit issues.
Oromia is a well organized umbrella organization responsible for processing, marketing, and commercializing coffee for its members. The union is comprised of 101 cooperatives, made up of 74,795 members as of 2006. OCFCU works exclusively in Oromia Regional State, which accounts for 65 percent of the country’s total coffee growing land and includes coffees from Limu, Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, Nekemte, Jimma, Sidamo, Neqemte/ Ghimbi, and Harrar.

Sidama Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (SCFCU) was founded in 2001 to represent coffee producing cooperatives located throughout the Sidama Zone of southern Ethiopia. Originally, the Union consisted of 47 cooperatives societies which represented over 70,000 farmers.
Today, SCFCU has grown to represent 47 primary cooperative societies and over 70,000 farmers (small holders) making SCFCU the second largest coffee producing cooperative union in Ethiopia. Nearly all coffee produced by our member cooperatives is shade grown in low densities under the canopies of indigenous trees and enset (false banana), a staple food crop.

Back in 2009 the actor and Broadway star Hugh Jackman spent a day working in the Sigiga Multipurpose Cooperative, a member of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union, in the Gedeo region of Ethiopia as part of his role as an ambassador of World Vision, an international relief, development and advocacy organization. The relationship he built with one of the farmer-members, Dukale, spurred he and his actor wife Deborra Lee Furness, also a World Vision ambassador, to start a social enterprise Laughing Man Worldwide, which markets the coffee produced by the cooperative.

currently represents over 43,794 farmers belonging to more than 300,000 families, and was established in June 2002. Its currently 23 member cooperatives are all located in Gedeo, southern Ethiopia. This area is in a region that is famous for coffee growing in the country.
The 62,004 hectares gardens that are dedicated to coffee alone, on average produce 9,000 tons of Yirgacheffe and 3,000 tons of Sidamo washed coffee each year. The area also produces 24,000 tons of sun-dried coffee annually.