Farm & Processing Station

Kayon Mountain farm is located in the Oromia Region's Guji Zone within the Shakiso woreda, in the Taro kebele. It was established in 2012 by a family who have been in coffee for a generation. Along with growing, the farm also does some amount of processing and exporting. Most families in the rural Taro Kebele make a living from farming, with coffee as a primary cash crop alongside subsistence crops for family consumption and other cash crops like bananas. The farm covers ~150 hectares and employs ~30 permanent staff, scaling to ~450 during harvest. Trees (≈ 3,500/ha) are intercropped with false banana for shade and mulch; compost is produced from coffee pulp. Beyond quality, Kayon invests locally—building a high school in Taro so students don’t have to travel, distributing seedlings to neighbors, offering financial assistance in times of need, and supporting an orphanage in a nearby village.

The Taro washing station (run by Kayon) is one of the area’s largest. It includes its own dry mill (capacity ~15 bags of parchment/hour) and rigorous cherry selection: members hand-sort, then use flotation tanks to remove unripe or overripe fruit before drying.

Variety

In Guji (and most of Ethiopia), farmers plant a diverse variety of locally adapted landraces. Be it seedlings sourced from neighborhood nurseries, shared among families, or selected from long-standing garden trees. Over decades, these plantings mingle, so an individual farm—and certainly a station blend—rarely contains a single, traceable cultivar.

Ethiopia also has widely distributed JARC “74-series” selections (like 74110, 74112, 74158), but these improved lines has been often interplanted with older local types. In 2023 World Coffee Research has released their arabica coffee genetic fingerprint database in collaboration with Sweden based AgriTek to ease the process of genetic identification of individual plants.

The broad genetic base in Guji and Ethiopia contributes to this origin’s hallmark complexity—fruit-forward character, sweet structure, and clean acidity.

Source: World Coffee Research, Coffee Story: Ethiopia

Process – Natural

Ripe cherry is hand-sorted and floated, then sun-dried on raised beds for ~15–18 days with regular turning for even moisture. Beds are covered at midday and overnight with shade or plastic netting to prevent over-drying and protect against dew. This careful approach preserves the natural terroir while bringing bold fruit and clean structure to the cup.

Source: Red Fox Coffee Merchants