We've extended our impact into the vibrant Kaffa Forest with its majestic mountains, vast valleys, and verdant vegetation. Most know Kaffa as the birthplace of Coffea arabica, but we’re here for the honey.
Kaffa is one of Ethiopia’s five biosphere reserves. Biosphere reserves are UNESCO-designated areas where interdisciplinary approaches to managing changes in and interactions between social and ecological systems are tested, including conflict prevention and biodiversity conservation. The research is community empowered, developing local solutions to global problems like climate change. Once an area becomes a biosphere reserve, UNESCO’s presence there inspires businesses (Like Foresetd Foods), NGOs and government and foundation donors to channel investment and resources into the ecosystem and the communities living within it. These organizations aim to preserve wildlife, build climate change resilience and improve livelihoods through economic development opportunities, including agroforestry.
Offering our support to NABU in Kaffa
Right now, most see us as a single-origin honey brand, but Maryiza is just the first step of our journey; we plan to do even more to conserve forests through regenerative agroforestry. Beyond honey, we’ll be producing an array of agroforestry products with our beekeeping partners, such as spices, herbs, fruits, gums and resins.
In 2019, researching more holistic and profitable approaches to conservation agroforestry for our forest farmer partners drew our attention to Kaffa, and we began searching for existing development projects to get involved in here. Many experts advised we connect with NABU, an NGO whose impact through climate-smart, smallholder-inclusive projects has been positively recognized across Ethiopia. Much of NABU’s on-the-ground development work is focused on supporting forest communities in effectively implementing regenerative and conservation agriculture practices.
In Kaffa specifically, NABU were running a project that aimed to tackle the amplified negative effect that climate change has on women and children. NABU had established six female-farmer cooperatives, each made up of 30–60 members, and were helping these women to generate income from environmentally friendly farming by bringing climate-smart agroforestry into their backyards. These backyards are conveniently in close proximity to the women and have nutrient-rich soils, which are perfect for growing valuable spices and herbs such as Ethiopian holy basil, cardamom, and turmeric.
NABU learned of our experience working with smallholders in other forests across Ethiopia’s Southwestern Afromontane region to produce honey and then market it in the USA, and were eager to see if honey production could serve as an additional income stream for their female-farmer cooperatives. NABU had already tried to make this a reality, piloting a modern box beekeeping and honey production program with one of their six cooperatives called Andinet. They had set about training the Andinet farmers, but because the farmers had never used these modern hives before, they struggled to harvest any honey from them. On top of this, Andinet hadn’t been able to find reliable buyers to sell their honey to. This presented the perfect opportunity for us to expand our partner beekeeping network to include the Andinet farmers, while providing NABU and Andinet with a long-term buyer both eager to dedicate time and resources to training the farmers and intent on purchasing their regeneratively produced forest honeys.
After a year and a half of chatting, we finally began our training with Andinet this year!
Building our partnership with Andinet cooperative
Human-centered research is at the heart of how we approach building relationships with our smallholder farmer partners. We recognize that there are nuances between a community’s relationship with its local ecosystem, its traditional practices of beekeeping and its capacity to improve beekeeping and honey production practices. Unless we take the time to better understand these nuances and what will incentivize forest communities to help conserve their critically biodiverse forest ecosystems, we won’t be able to develop solutions that catalyze conservation. It’s a gradual, iterative process focused on learning from and strengthening our forest community partnerships.
This April, we conducted our first course of beekeeping and honey production training with Andinet. Not only did 70 of Andinet’s female members show up, but also 10 of their husbands!
When we began our training with Andinet, we quickly realized that the women were struggling to beekeep using the modern box hives. In theory, this is more efficient than beekeeping using traditional methods – which require hives be hung deep in the forest up in tree canopies – because the box hives are conveniently located in the women’s backyards and should enable them to produce greater volumes of honey. But Andinet weren’t able to bait, capture, and retain bee colonies in their modern hives. We discovered that domesticating bees in this way is difficult for many smallholders as the dominant, traditional practices require much less to no bee colony management. Many Andinet farmers already had experience with traditional beekeeping, mostly through working with their husbands, who are very experienced traditional beekeepers. Abebech (pictured above), who is one of Andinet’s most respected members and hosts several of the cooperative’s modern hives in her backyard, helped us to understand this.
Although we supported Andinet in continuing to use their traditional practices, the farmers were still keen to learn how to keep bees and produce honey with their modern hives. We therefore decided to train them in both modern beekeeping methods and topics that were relevant to improving their traditional honey production practices. We knew this would be a multi-year process, and in the meantime we wanted Andinet to feel confident that we were committed to building a long-term relationship with them. To prove our commitment, we made it clear that we planned to purchase honey from the women’s households’ traditional hives, while helping them to adopt beekeeping practices that enable them to produce honey with their modern box hives.
After our April training, our CEO Ariana returned a month later with Amsalu, (a member of our team who very helpfully speaks the local Kaffa language, among several others), and they successfully aggregated and purchased around 1,500 kgs of Andinet’s Geteme honey harvest!
So, what have we got to show for all of this?
The crude honey we’ve aggregated is currently being separated into filtered honey and crude wax. While we’re not sure exactly what it will taste like, we realized during harvest that Andinet’s Geteme honeycombs contained some Grawa honey. This was because the bees had been collecting and producing a minor amount of nectar from flowering Grawa trees just a few weeks prior. Rahel (on the left) came to us with a beautiful bucket of Geteme combs from her household’s traditional hives; if you look closely, you can see how the combs feature portions of the darker Grawa honey. Because of this, we expect that Andinet’s Geteme may have a more bitter taste than the Geteme you’re all familiar with from Gera Forest, which is floral and bright.
Through more training with Andinet, mostly focused on timing their hive management and harvest more tightly before and after major tree-flowering seasons, we hope to source not only a more dominantly Geteme honey, but also Grawa, our slightly bitter, orange-peel-like honey with an amber glow, and Bissana, our rich, chestnut-coloured honey with a nutty praline flavour.
Our work in Kaffa has only just begun, and we’re so excited to see what the future holds for our partnership with Andinet. We won’t rest until our mission to align conservation agroforestry with improved livelihoods is complete!
