Negussie Tadesse is the owner of Tatmara. He bought the land and started farming coffee in 2010. The 80 hectare farm is basically a native forest. Apart from some small scale honey production, there is wild cardamom, long pepper and fruits growing amongst the coffee, which also attracts wild animals such as baboons and pigs who eat coffee cherries and can break the coffee trees.

For this reason Negussie is considering planting more fruit on the farm to distract the animals from eating the coffee cherries. Negussie doesn’t use any agricultural inputs or agrochemicals. The only work he is doing on the farm is to cut weeds manually in order to control the weeds and also make cover for the ground (mulch) to prevent the soil from drying out. He prunes the coffee trees and renews some of the old coffee trees that were already planted on the farm before he purchased the land. Due to the native forest canopy, the soil is really rich in organic material and microorganisms which help feed the coffee plants. This most likely contributes to the very high quality coffees from this farm.

Good cultivars (74110 and 74112), shade cover and ideal climatic growing conditions also help create unique coffees that in our opinion are unmatched outside of Ethiopia. There is no use of mineral fertilisers on the farm and Ne