Contents:

• About Satemwa
• Location
• Background Information
• From their website:
• History
• From their website:
• On Coffee
• From their website:

About Satemwa

Location

Background Information

Satemwa is a 3rd generation family-owned Tea and Coffee Estate in the Shire Highlands of Malawi established in 1923. Malawi is a small country in the southern part of Africa and was the first country in Africa where tea was planted commercially.

For 100 years they have been crafting superior teas and coffees which are exported around the world.

Satemwa’s Teas and Coffees are made with love, passion and respect for the environment and communities around us. They believe in contributing to improving Malawi's standard of living by crafting quality products.

From their website:

WE CARE ABOUT...

In a word, SUSTAINABILITY.

What this means to us is: investing in people and community and stewarding the land whilst ensuring a return to sustain this investment.

To provide ourselves with a framework for communicating about the work we do, we use the following UN sustainable development goals.

• Good health and wellbeing: We have 4 clinics and an ambulance and work with government to provide ARVs and under 5 clinics free.

We also employ health surveillance assistants who go round communities checking on general health as well as education on general hygiene, waste disposal etc. Due to lack of government/other external resources, this becomes part of our social cost of business and part of sustainable production.

• Quality Education: We provide simple creches for working mothers, and together with government support a primary school of over 1.000 kids. Through the funds generated from sales to FAIRTRADE buyers we provide scholarships to about 120 kids and with RARE CHARITY (www.rarecharity.com) provide the route to tertiary education for promising kids who would otherwise not get the opportunity. The idea is this is an investment in the future with some of these kids come back to work in various guises in tea.
• Gender Equity: This is something that has long been close to us and we work hard to promote woman at Satemwa. Our previous Chairman Chip was personally driving this culture for many years and took time to mentor woman from all walks of life within our company and we hope to follow in his foo.
• Climate Action: as agriculturalists in a heavily populated and resource denuded region we are on the coal face of climate change. We are involved in dealing with its effects on a daily basis and planning for the future - investing in research for improved varieties, reforesting every spare corner of land, encouraging smallholders to plan woodlots and use energy efficient stoves, planting fruit forests for employees to learn from and enjoy the fruits of the list goes on.
• Partnerships: We believe partnerships are a great way to leverage our human resource and infrastructural assets that we have. We do this in many ways with a range of organisations. In the past with NGOs such as Medicine Sans Frontier to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 2000s, with our government to provide a weekly under 5 clinic not only to our own employees but to the 1000s of people living in our community and with buyers such as the rare company who set up the Rare Charity to deliver educational opportunity to talented but underprivileged young adults.

History

From their website:

In the early 20s the young Scot Maclean Kay bought his first piece of land in Malawi from a tobacco farmer to grow TEA.

His son Robert who got his nickname Chip when an American lady laid her eyes on the baby boy and said with a strong accent "Oh...he really looks like a chip off the block".Chip took over from his dad and did not slow down until he sadly passed away in the early 2020. In his late 80's he used to visit the factory several times a day (and night) and made sure he learned something new about anything by 12:00 each day. Satemwa will not be the same without him but we hear his voice in our head and we are trying hard to follow in his footsteps.

You will find his wife Dawn that was also born in Malawi in the sales office or if she is not there in the garden with a lot of dogs in tow.

Alexander "Alex" is their oldest son and he started varsity studying economics, but it didn't take very long before he realised, that was not what he wanted to do so quickly changed to Horticulture instead. Now he is in charge of most things that involve running Satemwa, including checking the accounts from time to time.

Farming is not an easy path with lots of ups and downs, a bit like the roads around us here. But we are all 100% passionate and committed about our farm that is our home, and there is defiantly a very stubborn streak in all the Kays (big and small).

We really do LOVE our Teas and Coffee and can't wait to share our passion with you!

On Coffee

From their website:

Since 1971 we have grown coffee...

All our coffee is grown at an altitude of 900 - 1,000m above sea level. Interspersed between the coffee fields are riverine forest areas. These areas play an important role in the protection of indigenous fauna and flora in the Southern Highlands of Malawi where population pressure has decimated all but a few isolated pockets.

We produce a range of coffee styles; a mild washed Arabica in the style of the East African Arabica's, a pulped natural and a natural coffee. Our coffees are all hand picked and hand sorted to ensure cherries are ripe, producing sweet, aromatic coffees. After channel grading, coffee is sun dried over 15-30 days to achieve a moisture content of 11-12%.

We currently have +/- 45ha of coffee in the ground and have recently changed our production philosophy to include old varieties (such as Geisha) use of shade, and integrated pest management techniques.

Since October 2008 we have planted a large number of trees in our coffee fields. The trees we have planted have been selected for the following reasons; they should be a 'cold' rather than a 'hot' tree in order not to compete excessively with our coffee, their ability to produce the right sort of shade, their attractiveness to birds, butterflies and other fauna, impact on the soil and how they complement the other trees species in our program. We regard this development as an important part of the future of coffee on Satemwa.

In order to better understand the natural systems at work in the areas of natural forest on Satemwa, we commissioned a study to survey the bird and tree life in these high value ecosystems.

Experiments are being carried out on anaerobic fermentation, coffee fertiliser, and shade trees.