Farm info

The town of Worka is located in the southern part of the Yirgacheffe region in the Gedeb woreda. Most people around Worka work in agricultural sectors, and coffee is the oldest and best paying cash crop. Small scale growers, some of whom own less than an acre of land, bring their cherries to community washing stations at Worka for processing. Coffees from Worka are grown at around 1900 meters above sea level on average, and the elevation combined with their perfect geographical location makes for some of the cleanest and most consistent coffees in the greater Sidamo region. This coffee was fermented for 32 hours in water with a pH of 8.5 before being dried on raised beds for 17 days.

The Worka washing station is the largest facility operated by Tracon Trading, with 360 drying beds on nearly 5 hectares of land and 596 smallholder producers contributing coffee. It was built in 2008 and processes up to 1.5 million kg of red cherry per year. Many improvements to the facility have been made in the past two years.

Worka coffee is prepped for export at Tracon Trading’s coffee cleaning and storage plant on 30,000 sq meters of land in Addis Ababa. The plant is equipped with modern Pinhalense coffee processing machines and a Buhler Z+ color sorter. The machine has the capacity of processing six tons per hour.  All the processing jobs are mechanical and electronic including final hand picking on conveyor belts. The six storage silos of the plant have a capacity of accommodating about 15,000 metric tons of coffee at a time. The warehouses are clean, with ample lighting and ventilation, which are very ideal for keeping the quality of the coffee.

Learn more about coffee varieties of Ethiopia.

Region

Yirgacheffe

Yirgacheffe is one of the coffee areas defined by the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange in recognition of the common quality and flavor attributes of coffee grown in the area around Yirgacheffe. This broad coffee area includes part of the Bornea Zone of the Oromia Region and the Gedeo Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR). The Gedeo Zone of SNNPR has five woredas, or districts: Wonago, Bule, Kochere, Gedeb, and Yirgacheffe, the last giving this coffee region its name.

The Gedeb woreda is the southernmost of the Gedeo Zone’s five woredas, located to the south of Kochere and west of Guji.