Why Shade Grown Coffee Is Important

What makes this promoting shade grown coffee even more important is it provides birds with steady habitat which is becoming rarer every year. Of course it would be better to stop the deforestation, but converting to shade grown coffee at least gives us (the birds and the humans) more time to set things right.

A shade grown coffee farmer stands in his coffee plot laced with orange, avocado, lime and scattered high-canopy trees. Birdsong rains down from above and the rustle of animals in the twigs and fallen leaves surrounds him on all sides. Dappled sunlight filters down and glints off the glossy green leaves of his mature coffee shrubs.

This vision is in sharp contrast to the sun-baked, acidified soil and relative silence found on standard full-sun coffee plantations, which must clear-cut the forest and use large quantities of toxic fertilizers and pesticides to keep their full-sun coffee productive.

Coffee is a shade-loving shrub and naturally-occurring varieties can only be cultivated under a canopy of shade trees. What we now refer to as "shade grown coffee" was the only way coffee was cultivated until 25 years ago, when new full-sun hybrids were developed that produced substantially higher yields for coffee farmers and allowed the creation of massive agribusiness-style plantations, which were not economically viable prior to this time.

The increased yields of full-sun coffee come at the expense:
* of the environment
* the flavor of the coffee itself
* of migratory bird populations, which have been decimated in the last 25 years.