Why we started a farm of our own

For 15 years, we have worked across rural Uganda supporting smallholder agronomy training programmes, whether for NGOs or for exporters: the kind of work that sits at the centre of most sustainable sourcing and development strategies in the region.

It's rewarding work. It's also, I gradually realised, harder to do well than I expected. As an advisor, you're asking farmers to change practices based on an outsider's viewpoint, while your own understanding of the tropical farm economy is necessarily miles removed from theirs. That gap started to feel like a real bottleneck.

So in 2025, we started Kawa Tamu Estates: a 30-acre regenerative Fine Robusta coffee farm in the Rwenzori foothills of western Uganda. The goal is to close this knowledge gap with hardcore field experience: to develop and test production practices ourselves, under the same constraints smallholders face, before recommending them to anyone else.

The land title has been secured and the company has been registered. We are opening this channel so you can join our daring journey into sustainable coffee farming from scratch. We want to do this in the open so others can learn from our mistakes, and hopefully our successes. We'll share what works, what doesn't, and why, as we go.