STiR coffee and tea magazine

8 STiR coffee and tea | 2025 Issue 1 Spring (Mar/Apr/May) L By Emily McIntyre ook into the motives of most small business owners, and you'll find a uniting theme: building generational wealth – or at least trying to. Most mothers and fathers who start a business (or continue an inherited one) hope their children will choose to come and work alongside them, ultimately passing the torch from one generation to the next and building a legacy that informs the future. Each is a link in a chain leading forward, extending backward. Most smaller coffee and tea farms work this way. Take, for example, the rolling green hills of Gichangi Estate, a smallish coffee and tea farm in Kirinyaga County, Central Kenya. In 1955, Stanley and Jane Gichangi planted their first coffee tree – a rare Blue Mountain variety, still to be found, weathered and gnarly, in the center of the plantation – and three generations later, the family still operates the farm. With 11 acres planted to coffee, it produces a decent amount annually for local consumption and for export, and serves as a kind of model farm for the area. Brothers Julius, Stanley, Da- vid, and Charles have run the farm collectively since 1994, and new generation Kevin Gichangi modernizes its image as he involves himself with the competitive barista scene in Kenya and acts as an ambassador to the world at large. Tension comes into play when you have a business (like a coffee farm) that carries a storied legacy, but doesn't really make sense financially. All across Kenya, the new genera- tion of coffee farmers choose to invest in planting other products that make more money and aren't so deeply tied to an abusive value chain, or abandon it altogether to seek ca- reers in the city or outside the country. This can be seen as well in the coffee- growing region of Gololcha, West Arsi, Ethiopia, where the older generation (led by charismatic mountain "godfather" Abebayehy Negash) spent years invest- ing in their coffee farms, working closely with foreign buyers like the now-defunct Catalyst Trade to build raised drying beds, implement cherry floating techniques, and learn how to cup and evaluate their cof- fees to international standards. The heyday of that project was in the 2017-18 harvest cycle. While some of those growers con- tinue producing coffee, the general trend with the new generation in the area is to ei- ther be content producing commodity cof- fee (which sells at a premium to the Saudi market in this area of Harar) or tear out the trees and plant beans, teff, or even kaat, a stimulant with multiple growth cycles per year and a higher price than coffee. The mix of hope and hard work pro- pels each new cohort forward, for as long as industry has existed. Whether the new generation will take over and grow really depends on many factors, which often boil down to one question: will this en- deavor bring the money and career suc- cess they need? Ketan Patel, a fourth-generation tea producer, answered the question by rede- fining it. Under his direction, Jalinga Tea Company is the very first certified CO2- neutral tea plantation in India. When dis- cussing his vision upon taking the helm, he said, "We need to do something for the environment. We need to think about the future." The story of Jalinga Tea began in 1935 with Patel's ancestor Manighai G. Patel, and Ketan works closely with his father, Kirit Patel, to manage the business. Their vision isn't just to carry the Jalinga legacy forward, but to model a new kind of business to the rest of the Indian tea in- dustry, which desperately needs a new way forward for sustainability. In each of these three examples, the generational question is at the heart of the story. Will the son (or daughter) pick up the mantle handed to them by their father (or mother)? That's a question remaining to be seen as climate change, geopolitics, economic upheavals, and market forces influence the success or failure of small businesses in the coffee and tea industry. PAWQARA member families overlooking their coffee farms in Cajamarca, Peru. Good Growth: The Generational Question New-generation coffee farmer Kevin Gichangi is working hard to modernize the family business and bring it into the competitive barista scene. Abebayehy Negash, the "godfather" of the Gololcha coffee growing region in West Arsi, Ethiopia cups his coffees with buyers.

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