Yahya Al-Faqeeh

Yahya Al-Faqeeh · Single Farmer Lot · Natural · Yemenia · Aljidan, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

Yahya Al-Faqeeh won the last Best of Yemen. His lot took the top place of the 2025 auction and sold for more than eighteen hundred US dollars a kilo, a figure the local market could not have offered him in any year, for any coffee.

He put it into trees. His farm now carries between a thousand and twelve hundred of them, up from a few hundred, and their ages run right across the span: the oldest are about seventy years old, then a group of two year olds, then seedlings that have been in the ground three months.

Yahya has farmed for forty five years. It was his mother who taught him, and he never learned to read or write. Twelve members of the family work the coffee with him and five of his children join the harvest, from a household of nineteen. He keeps bees as well, and grows sorghum and maize.

There is one job he has not been able to finish. He started building a water harvesting tank to hold his crop through drought and ran out of money partway, and completing it is what he wants next, along with more planting. His reason for all of it is straightforward. He wants to leave his children coffee trees that earn.