Papua New Guinea Baroida Estate

The Baroida Plantation, located in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, was founded by Ben Colbran in the 1960’s. Ben first purchased the land from a native man named Taro & they were amongst the first people to cultivate crops in these valleys. In 1965, the government encouraged the early settlers to start growing coffee as a long term sustainable crop. Ben, with the Baroida Plantation, started to plant coffee trees, becoming one of the first coffee producers and exporters of the Eastern Highlands.

Like the spirit of Baroida, the Colbran Family is now in its third generation, with Ben’s son Nickel and grandson Chris running not only the Baroida plantation, but sourcing coffee from throughout a vast supply chain network of both estate and smallholder growers around them.

The Baroida plantation sits at the apex of the Lamari River Valley and Mount Jabarra range. The plantation itself sits at about 5,550 ft above sea level, amongst thousands of hectares of cleared land with former colonial coffee estates surrounding them (now run by native landowners) and flanked by mountains (up to 7,500ft) filled with smallholder coffee producers. After some 50 years working with the estate and smallholder producers of this region; providing extension & agronomy services in the early years and more recently by building roads, bridges, schools and runways, the people of the Lamari Valley have built an enormous respect for the Colbran family as well as finding well needed markets for their coffee.