Etiopien Tesfaye Bekele

Tesfaye Bekele founded the Suke Quto Organic farm in 2005 with five hectares planted with coffee trees, all in a natural forest environment. The farm now has 221 hectares of coffee, and over 170 other family farms supply their coffee berries to the farm. The coffee is grown 100% naturally; the coffee trees are nourished from a combination of leaf litter, shade tree & coffee tree residues and pulp. The process can be described as almost completely circular, from seedlings to trees to pulp and pruning to ground cover and back to the trees again.

To preserve this wet-processed coffee's pleasant sweetness and lively fruitiness, Tesfaye has picked the coffee cherries at full maturity and dried them slowly on raised drying beds. The result is an elegant coffee with a light body.

Tesfaye Bekele is widely recognized as one of the pioneers who helped put Guji specialty coffee on the global map. At a time when the Guji zone was primarily known for cattle farming, he envisioned a different future—one rooted in coffee. “I don’t consider myself just a coffee farmer; coffee is everything to me,” says Tesfaye Bekele, founder of Suke Quto Farm. “All my time and energy go into the beans I grow and process.”

Tesfaye started his career in natural resources & environmental protection with the Ethiopian government, in charge of the Guji and Borena zones - which were then a single administrative region. Between 1997 and 1999, Guji was ravaged by extensive forest fires that burned over 5,000 hectares of forest and left communities in crisis and searching for answers. In the aftermath, many locals returned to the burnt land and converted it into farmland, planting crops such as teff and maize.

As a committed government official, Tesfaye understood their need to rebuild their lives - but he also recognized the environmental risks of uncontrolled land conversion. “I knew I couldn't just stop them from using the land,” he explains. “So I had to offer an alternative. The alternative was a bold vision: to reforest the area while integrating coffee farming to promote biodiversity and long-term sustainability. The community welcomed his idea and asked him to deliver the coffee plants - marking the beginning of a transformation that would change Guji's landscape and future.