Growing an ecologically responsible coffee plant is possible. If we move away from the sun grown high input models that dominates the market today, we can create a semi self-maintaining system that can produce a better cup as well as diversifying a farmers source of income. Models based off  polyculture agroforestry systems provides a biodiverse system that can both benefit the grower and the soil. A modified wild forest system which is “The most basic form of management beyond pure extraction, to modify the forest environment to favor the production of a valuable product.”( Belcher, Michon, Angelsen, Perez, Asbjornsen 3) would make and ideal system for coffee. Coffee would be interplanted with tropical hardwoods like mahogany, a nitrogen fixer, spice trees like cinnamon and fruit trees like mangos, cacao, papaya, guava, and durian. These provide shade as well as contributing to a farmers health and economic growth. Promoting nutrient accumulating and nitrogen fixing ground covers like legumes, fennel, garlic chives, and stinging nettle both protects and builds soils. though shade grown coffee is likely to have a lower yield, demand more manual labor due to inaccessibility of fossil fuel driven machinery, premote habitats for mammal pests, and a lower profit from coffee; the benefits far out way that. The diversification of market crops lowers the dependence on a single crop for an income, drop inputs of fertilizers, promotes soil health, prevents erosion, and in most cases provides a better cup of coffee. Systems like these coupled with cooperative processing and distribution facilities provide a brighter future for coffee in the shade.

Credits:

Photo Credit : http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/sites/default/files/site-images/education/images/shade_grown1.jpg

Belcher, Brian, Genevieve Michon, Arild Angelsen, Manuel Ruiz Pérez, and Heidi Asbjornsen. 2005. “The Socioeconomic Conditions Determining the Development, Persistence, and Decline of Forest Garden Systems.” Economic Botany 59 (3): 245–53.

Within the Green Kingdom there exists a vast family of flowering plants known as the Rubiaceae, a nation which counts as members a number of well-known and loved genera, including Rubia (madder), Galium (woodruff), Gardenia, and the treasured Coffea, which yields one of the most widely traded plant products in the world, the coffee bean.  The coffee bean – technically a seed – is mostly obtained from two species: Coffea arabica, providing about 60 % or more of the world’s supply, and Coffea canephora, also known as Robusta, which accounts for the remaining 40% (Hoffman 12).  Coffee is grown on every continent which spans the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and can only grow there; it is at its best in areas of moderate rainfall and on hillsides between 1000 and 3000 ft in elevation (Crawford 50).

The black seed of arabica has been spreading across the world since before 800 AD, and there are dozens if not hundreds of localized varieties adapted to specific conditions borne of its diaspora.  Its zone of highest genetic diversity is in the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, an area considered by many to be its original homeland (Hein 177).  As a potent bioactive medicine it has been revered for centuries; Avicenna wrote of the properties of coffee in the year 900.  It contains dozens of synergistic alkaloids but its primary draw – and undoubtedly the source of its incredible power and influence – is the stimulant caffeine, although it also, like the similarly small, dark and tropical cacao bean, contains small amounts of theobromine.

Coffee has been a plant of infamy since it was first cultivated in Yemen and Ethiopia and smuggled to Europe in the late Middle Ages.  Its history is inexorably intertwined with the other famous commodities of European colonialism, notably cacao, sugar, tea, and human slaves, and it is today traded on global markets alongside petroleum and wheat.  Shrines to the coffee god can be found in breakrooms, waiting rooms, and many private homes across the Western world.

There are two species of Coffea which are grown for commercial purposes: Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta.  Both are cultivated solely between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, 23.5 degrees north and south of the equator. However, C. robusta is more pest and disease resistant and can withstand wider growing conditions suitable for commercial cultivation such as lower altitudes and higher temperatures, though it produces a reportedly unpleasant flavor (Hoffman 12).  When planting land to coffee, young volcanic soils are very sought after due to high nutrient content leading to high yields (Preston 226),.  In Brazil, “the most advanced and industrialized coffee-producing country in the world” (Hoffman 184), coffee is predominately grown on Terra Roxa, a soil derived from igneous rocks, and between 80 and 90 percent of the cultivated Terra Roxa land is planted to coffee (Preston 239). The 19^th and 20^th centuries brought a wave of land grabs for coffee production in Brazil: forests were cut and burned, soils robbed of their fertility, accelerated erosion, and land prices driven through the roof (Preston 226-238).  A solution to alleviate erosion and regulate fertility loss in coffee lands is the implementation of agroforestry methods, or producing shade-grown coffee, as mineral nitrogen is better retained in a system incorporating nitrogen-fixing shade trees than in coffee monocultures (Munroe 40 & 45).

Works Cited:

Hoffman, James. 2014. The World Atlas of Coffee. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: Firefly Books.

Munroe, J.W., G. Soto, Filho Virginio, R. Fulthorpe, and M.E. Isaac. 2015. “Soil Microbial and Nutrient Properties in the Rhizosphere of Coffee under Agroforestry Management.” Applied Soil Ecology 93: 40–46.

Preston, James. 1932. “The Coffee Lands of Southeastern Brazil.” Geographical Review 22 (2): 225–44.

Photocredit: http://www.jackeez.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/650x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/B/r/BrazilCoffeeCookie/1lb-Fresh-Roasted-Gourmet-Brazil-Cerrado-Coffee-Calusa-Coffee-Roasters-33.jpg