Page 78 - #57 English
P. 78
Origin
Story&Photo/ Melanie Leeson from the collaborative
KENYA
The Backward Rise of the Small Estate Farm
Connecting quality coffee with specific farms and their owners has become the
specialty coffee norm, which emphasizes cup score, long-term relationships, and trans-
parency. This bodes well for smallholders and roasters alike, as these expectations point
to an evolving market; one that is slowly shifting away from purely speculative pricing
and is now favouring connections between specific people selling and buying to/from
one another.
Kenya, then, has been anomalous from other specialty origins in that much of its
best quality lots are sold through a centralized auction and come from cooperatives serv-
ing up to 2000 smallholder members each. But contrary to other origins, many of Kenya’s
coffee farmers’ cooperatives are impressively run organizations. Many of them actually
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