Coffee Growers Rediscovering Rain Forest Trees

NEBRASKA CITY -  Jonathan Ferguson, a coffee quality specialist for the Arbor Day Foundation, says farmers on the edges of the world’s greatest rain forests are realizing the benefits of trees to coffee production.

Ferguson: “We work with farmers that are living within, amongst and right near rain forests. Those are usually around protected areas of landscapes and there is a buffer zone between farm communities and wildlife preservations. We want to purchase coffee from farmers that want to continue to utilize trees within their coffee production.”

The Arbor Day Foundation has its own line of shade-grown coffee and sends Ferguson to countries like Columbia to check on quality and encourage farmers to embrace forestry systems.

Ferguson: “A lot of coffee grown in areas with shade trees, so we want to incentivize and inspire them to continue to do the practices they’ve been doing for a long time. They work. They help soil. So we are buying coffee that is shade grown.”

He said the majority of coffee in the 1920s was produced within forestry systems, but there was a push by the 1980s for countries like Costa Rica and Columbia to repay loans to the World Bank and other lenders.

 Ferguson: “They told the agriculture sector, the government of Columbia, hey you need to repay your loans and the best way you can do that is to grow a lot of coffee and the best way to grow a lot of coffee is get rid of these trees and grow these varietals that have a very high yield potential, so they planted their coffee very close together, just like corn in Nebraska, but on hillsides, they removed all the trees.”

He said the result is depleted soil nutrients and hillsides that are unprotected against mudslides. He said trees regulate temperature shifts in higher elevations and provide a variety of protections to plants.

Ferguson: “What they saw, after they did that, was the soil depleted. They saw the disappearance of a lot of the wildlife and, at the end of the day, the yield went down. The quality went down. They started re-introducing their trees.”

He said shade-grown coffee takes a little longer to grow, but that allows the plant to develop fruits with more flavor.