Shone Coffee Farm · Unchu Mountain, Limu Kosa, Ethiopia
Shone Coffee Farm.
One mountain, one family, one harvest a year.
Every bag of Midrib comes off this land. Five hundred acres of forest coffee on Mount Unchu, in the old Kaffa country where Arabica was first found growing wild — farmed without irrigation or chemical input, picked red by hand, and dried in the sun on raised beds a few hundred metres from where it grew.
The farm
Five hundred acres on Mount Unchu.
Bezuayehu Shone Coffee Farm sits in Limu Kosa district, Jimma Zone, in the former Kaffa province of south-western Ethiopia — the region where Arabica coffee was first found growing wild. It is 430 kilometres from Addis Ababa on roads that get worse as they climb.
The land was taken up in 2005 and planted as forest coffee: trees under native shade, no irrigation, no chemical input, cherries sun-dried on raised beds. By 2012 the farm had exported its first eighteen tonnes of Limu specialty coffee to a roaster in Oakland, California. Midrib buys from the same beds.
Region
Limu Kosa, Jimma Zone · Mount Unchu
Established
2005 · 500 acres
Method
Organic forest coffee, sun-dried
People
10 permanent staff · 100 seasonal pickers
The land
Coffee under the forest canopy.
Shone is not planted in rows. The coffee grows beneath native shade trees on the slopes of Mount Unchu, the way wild Arabica has grown in this part of Ethiopia for centuries. The canopy keeps the soil cool and lets the cherries ripen slowly.
Nothing is irrigated and nothing is sprayed. Rain feeds the trees, fallen leaves feed the soil, and the forest stays standing because the coffee depends on it.
History of the farm
Bezuayehu Shone.
Born in Jimma, the coffee city at the heart of the region, Mrs. Shone is an accountant by training and one of very few women to found and run a commercial coffee estate in Ethiopia. She has spent two decades opening a path for other women to invest in agriculture, and is a founding member of the Ethiopian Coffee Growers, Producers and Exporters Association.
The farm still runs the way she set it up: a quality manager on-site, a farm manager for the day-to-day, and a stated commitment to spend part of the profit on the people who live at the edge of the trees. The farm carries the memory of her late husband, Meheretab W. Selasse.
Meheretab built Shone alongside her, on the conviction that the forest on Mount Unchu was worth more standing than cleared. The coffee still grows where the trees allow it, picked by hand and processed at the farm, and the families who work the harvest are still the farm's first neighbours. That is his legacy: a farm run for the long view, handed on intact.
Stewardship
Dr. Markos returned to his family's land.
Following the death of his father, Dr. Markos returned to Shone Coffee Farm, taking responsibility for a legacy he did not expect to inherit.
He left a career in medicine to do it. Today he looks after Shone the way it was set up to be looked after: coffee under native shade rather than in cleared rows, cherries picked ripe and sorted by hand, and the people who work the land treated as part of the farm rather than a cost of it. He brings a doctor's patience to it, learning the land season by season from the team that has tended it for years.
The work
Picked ripe, sorted by hand, dried in the sun.
Harvest runs a few weeks a year. A hundred casual workers arrive from the villages below and live on the farm in the labour quarters; ten permanent staff run the nursery, the beds and the books the rest of the year. Cherries are picked red, sorted on tarps by hand, and laid a few centimetres deep on raised beds under shade cloth, turned through the day until they rattle.
That is the whole process. No washing station downstream, no exporter deciding what the lot is worth — the same natural Limu the farm has shipped since 2012, roasted by us in Tulsa a few weeks after it leaves the mountain.
The people behind the bag.
Photographed across three harvests at Shone. A hundred pickers arrive for the season from the villages below, live on the farm, and drink the coffee they pick — roasted over the fire in the same shed where the day is counted.
The community
A clinic, a school, and the farms next door.
Shone Coffee Farm is part of a larger community in Limu. Beyond growing coffee, the farm maintains relationships with neighboring smallholder farmers and supports community initiatives. There is a clinic on the farm where neighbours are treated at a fair price, and an elementary and junior secondary school built on the land — the first schooling available to most of the children who attend, nearly all from poor rural households nearby.
The school
Elementary and junior secondary, on the farm, open to the children of pickers and of the smallholders around it.
The clinic
Medical treatment at a fair price for the families who live beside the farm.
The smallholders
Shone supplies seedlings and technical help to the growers around it, and buys their cherry at a fair market price — uncommon for a private estate.
Taste the harvest.
Two separations from this season, roasted in Tulsa a few weeks after they leave the mountain.