Hased & Ahmed Ali Subaih

Hased & Ahmed Ali Subaih · Single Farmer Lot · Natural · Yemenia · Bait Alal, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

Hased Subaih did not learn coffee from his father. He learned it from his older brothers, following them through the terraces as a boy while they taught him how to farm and how to pick, and the eldest of them is still the person he is closest to on the land today.

That pattern has held. Thirty three members of the family now work in coffee, each with a defined job in the season, which is less a household helping out at harvest than a small organised workforce. Their trees number four hundred and seventy five, and the ages run from one year old to forty, the sign of a farm where something new goes in every year without fail.

Hased would plant more if he could. What stops him is not appetite but arithmetic: there is only so much land in the valley and only so much water to put on it, and both are already fully committed.

He is precise about what the auction has done for him, and it is not only the price on the day. Since taking part, his standing in the village has risen, and the traders who come through now open at higher numbers than they used to. That change, in his view, is the whole argument for specialty coffee, which he calls the future of Yemeni coffee.