Habiba Ahmed

Habiba Ahmed · Female Farmer Lot · Deep Fermentation · Yemenia · Hijrat Al Ain, Hayma Dakhiliya, Sana'a

Habiba Ahmed has been farming coffee for fifty years, and everything she knows about it came from her father. She grew up among his trees in Hijrat Al Ain and never went to school. The terraces were the education.

Her farm holds around four hundred trees, most of them more than thirty years old, high on the slopes between 2,000 and 2,300 metres where the fruit ripens slowly and the harvest is never large. Thirty five people work in the coffee alongside her. A little fruit grows on the same ground, but coffee is what the family runs on.

Water is the recurring problem, along with a pest the farmers here call al dhaib, which takes its share of the trees most years. Even so, she is clear that specialty coffee pays her better than anything the local market ever offered.

What she wants is for her children to become major coffee farmers, earning enough from coffee alone that they need nothing else to live on.

This lot was deep fermented, the ripest cherries slow dried for more than thirty days for depth and body. Habiba was in the 2024 auction, and this is her return to it.