Growing Coffee in Sustainable Environments

Coffee growing is an age-old practice, but a new trend in specialty coffee farming is to move towards sustainability. There are several choices in sustainable practices available within coffee farming, including shade growing, which worked to produce a better tasting coffee crop. There are many advantages to sustainable coffee cultivation, including the fact that it offers rich harvests and is more gentle to the land to provide a fertile growing environment for years to come.

Shade grown coffee is a practice that has received attention lately in the media, but it actually was the original method used for growing coffee. One of the main benefits to shade grown coffee is that it will offer quality rather than quantity, which is something that you need if you are hoping to drink a specialty coffee roast. Coffee that is mass produced and of a lower quality will be grown with sun cultivation methods, but shade growing is the ideal standard for a sustainable coffee environment. Shade grown coffee has the opportunity to develop at a slower rate, which means that it can get larger in size and produce a better flavor within the bean. This is an investment because it requires a slower cultivation on a smaller farm, but this is what will produce a higher grade coffee bean.

Shade grown coffee is also an eco-friendly practice because it does not use harmful chemicals or pesticides. Coffee is grown on a tree that naturally needs to be shaded to thrive, and it does best in filtered or indirect sunlight. When the coffee trees grow in the shade, they have the ability to develop at a more even rate to produce an excellent tasting crop. Another benefit of shade grown coffee is that it will offer a habitat to migrating birds. This is beneficial to both the birds and the environment, but it also provides an eco-friendly atmosphere because the birds have the capability to eat all of the insects off of the coffee crops. This works to promote a balanced ecosystem, as well as natural pest control. One other advantage to this is that the waste from the birds will create a fertilizer byproduct for the coffee trees, which is a natural method of fertilizing without the use of chemicals. Because of this practice, coffee trees that are cultivated with this shade grown method will have much less need for chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Just because coffee is shade grown does not mean it is organic, but this is the first step in the process to organic coffee farming. One of the only setbacks to this is that many coffee farmers must compete with supply and demand, so they are often pressured to produce a lower quality coffee crop within a faster time period. Sometimes these farmers do need to use pesticides to make sure the coffee trees are protected from insects, so shade grown coffee is different from organic coffee in that respect. However, shade grown coffee is still a step in the right direction to providing sustainability in a productive coffee growing environment.