Shade grown coffee

Shade-grown coffee is a form of the beverage produced from coffee plants grown under a canopy of trees. A canopy of assorted types of shade trees is created to cultivate shade-grown coffee. Because it incorporates principles of natural ecology to promote natural ecological relationships, shade-grown coffee can be considered an offshoot of agricultural permaculture or agroforestry. The resulting coffee is usually sold as “shade-grown”.

Coffee (especially Coffea arabica) is a small tree or shrub that grows in the forest understory in its wild form, and traditionally was grown commercially under other trees that provided shade. Since the mid-1970s, new sun-tolerant trees and shrubs have been developed in response to fungal disease presence, especially coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), and with the aim to yield higher production rates. As a result of modernization and a push for higher yielding crops, sun-tolerant coffee plants were created to produce larger yields through higher-density, open planting, but the cultivation practices used for them are considered unsustainable and often have a negative impact on the environment. This has resulted in a new trend in support of shade-grown coffee.

Recent data have shown that there is a direct correlation between the structural complexity of a coffee plantation and the number of species that can be found there. The forest-like structure of shade coffee farms provides habitat for a great number of migratory and resident birds, reptiles, ants, butterflies, bats, plants and other organisms. Of all agricultural land uses, shade-grown coffee is most likely the crop that supports the highest diversity of migratory birds, native flora and fauna. In all of the studies, a clear spectrum of species richness emerged ranging from high species diversity in “rustic” shaded polycultures to extremely low species diversity in unshaded monocultures.

Biological diversity in traditional “rustic” plantations can be extremely high, ranging from 90 to 120 species of plants on a single site. Tree species richness in shade-grown coffee sites ranges from 13 to 58 species per site. Herb diversity was found to be 2 to 4 times that of tree diversity on any given site, and shrub diversity was fairly low in all sites. Epiphytes are also extremely diverse in shaded polycultures; 90 total epiphytic species were found in 10 sites of shade-grown coffee plots.

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Wikipedia