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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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Steaming Bean Coffee Co., P.O. Box 3177, Telluride, CO 81435 Tel: 1-800-230-BEAN (2326) Email: info@thebean.com

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