Hameed Subaih

Hameed Subaih · Single Farmer Lot · Natural · Yemenia · Bait Alal, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

Hameed Subaih learned to pick only ripe cherries from his father and his grandfather, long before there was any premium attached to doing it, and he holds to the standard because it protects the tree as much as the crop. What specialty coffee changed was not the practice but whether anyone paid for it.

He started at about ten years old and has been at it for sixty years. There was a period when he went looking for work in the city, but he kept returning, and these days a good part of his time goes on showing the younger members of the family how the work is done properly.

His farm holds around fourteen hundred trees. The oldest are said to be more than two hundred years old and the youngest went into the ground a year ago, because he pulls out anything that has stopped producing and replaces it rather than leaving dead wood on the terraces.

The hardest limits are practical. His irrigation reaches less than a third of the crop, and manure and other inputs are both expensive and hard to get hold of. He has been in three auctions, in 2022, 2023 and 2024, placing sixth in 2023, and he credits the auction with selling the coffee under his own name. What he is working for is straightforward: that his children should be able to make a dignified living from this farm.