Shade Grown Coffee
Coffee plants need only a few hours of sunshine a day. Rubber and banana plants
normally provide adequate shade from wind and sun and their leaves provide a
rich mulch to sustain the coffee trees while nutrients are plucked from the
ground to feed the berries. When the International Coffee Agreement - a price
stabilization agreement - was in place (it folded in 1990) farmers were
rewarded with export quotas based on the volume of coffee they produced. This
meant that producers were more concerned with quantity of production rather
than on quality. Many found that by clearing the shade trees their plantations
would produce more coffee albeit of a lower quality. They then sought to
supplement the lack of natural fertilizers with man made ones starting a
vicious cycle of pollutants finding their way into the local water sources.
Many farmers, such as those in Peru's Chanchamayo valley and in the more remote
sections of Oaxaca in SW Mexico, have a long history of organic, natural
farming and never changed their methods of production - fertilizers are
expensive and the cost of transportation makes them prohibitively so for many
small farmers in remote areas. With the collapse of the ICO came a realization
that the only way to acheive a better price for coffee was to produce a better
product.
We now have a reliable supply of quality, organically and naturally produced
coffees whose tastes reflect the amount of painstaking labor that goes in to
producing each pound. Try our Organic Mountain Harvest (70% Peruvian, 30%
Mexican) as a fine example of what can be done without fertilizers but with the
hand of a craftsman roaster.
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