Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Shade-grown Coffee

I’m writing a book about ways to help birds, and once a week or so will be talking about things we can do in our lives to protect or help birds. Today’s tip is to drink shade-grown coffee.

Coffee comes from a shrub, Coffea arabica, native to the forest understory of east Africa. It’s related to gardenias. Coffee has an enormous economic impact: it’s the third most common import in the U.S., behind oil and steel. Worldwide, in dollar value, according to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, coffee is second only to petroleum as the most important legal export commodity. The U.S. consumes about 1/3 of the world’s coffee. Although coffee originated in Africa, currently over 2/3 of current world production takes place in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Wild, natural coffee plants require shade to grow. In the American tropics, coffee was traditionally grown in the understory of natural tropical forests. The tropical diversity, along with the rainforest trees’ biochemical defenses to protect themselves against at least some of the insects and fungus that thrive in such a wet environment, help minimize the pests that easily destroy monocultures, and so traditional coffee-growers had few problems with disease or bugs. The shade trees not only protect the coffee plants from too much rain and sun, they also provide organic matter for natural mulch, reducing the need for fertilizer, protecting the soil from erosion, and contributing important nutrients to the soil. And these traditional coffee plantations, because they preserve much of the natural forest diversity or at least support some diversity, provide food and habitat for many birds, both tropical residents and neotropical migrants. In areas of the tropics that have been heavily deforested, shade-grown coffee plantations are often the last refuge for forest-adapted plants and animals. Shade coffee is mostly grown by family-owned small farms.

Unfortunately, the huge economic value of coffee has led to more intensive growing techniques by large landowners, which has led to the development of coffee cultivars that can be grown in the sun, planted in monocultures like cornfields. Sun-grown coffee allows plantation owners to grow much more coffee per acre, but at the expense of heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, the rapid depletion and erosion of the soil, and the loss of many natural plants and animals.

Oddly, the huge amount of transpiration of tropical plants actually produces much of the rain and clouds in tropical forests and shade-coffee plantations. Cutting rainforest for sun-coffee plantations actually reduces the natural rainfall and cloud cover! The continuing need for irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides makes these intensive sun coffee plantations impractical for any except large land-owners and corporations who can afford to move on to a new plantation when one area becomes too depleted and damaged to support coffee growth. And when they move on, without the plants holding and releasing what rain does fall, it takes many, many years for the soil to support regrowth.

Shade-grown coffee farms are diverse enough to sustain about 2/3 of the natural bird species found in rainforest, while sun coffee plantations support barely 1/10 of the natural populations of birds. Buying shade-grown coffee helps tropical birds, and it helps the many U.S. and Canadian birds that winter in the tropics. Unfortunately, much of the coffee available in grocery stores is sun-grown, because the large companies that sell it are more concerned with saving a few dollars in the short term than the survival of the tropical forests their trade depends on in the long run.

But if you look for it, shade-grown coffee is available locally from several suppliers, including Wild Birds Unlimited and some Alakef blends. Proctor and Gamble now sells fair trade shade coffee under its Millstone label. Shade coffee costs a little more than sun-coffee, but tastes more flavorful, is better for your health, and helps birds. Sounds like a bargain to me.