Coffee production is under siege. External pressures like climate change and volatile green prices are combining with internal forces like bad actors deforesting lands to grow coffee, creating an uncertain future. This has led many producers to seek sustainable practices, things like regenerative farming and a move away from mono-cropping.
While information about these ecologically focused practices is abundant, it has historically been scattered across multiple sources, making it harder to access, particularly by those who could put that knowledge into action. That’s why non-profit Coffee Watch has teamed up with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza , or CATIE) to create the Coffee Agroforestry E-Library. Completely free to access, the Coffee Agroforestry E-Library is “the world’s first comprehensive online database dedicated to scientific literature on shade-grown coffee.”
Agroforestry is the introduction of multiple crops (as opposed to mono-cropping) as well as integrating shade trees to create a greater biodiversity on the coffee farm. The positive effects of agroforestry are multiple, including creating greater climate resilience, sequestering more carbon before it has enters the atmosphere, and creating additional revenue streams for producers.
Hosted on Zotero, the Agroforestry E-Library contains nearly 1,300 articles providing science-backed evidence and best practices for the implementation of shade-grown coffee at the farm level. Articles are available in English and Spanish and can be broken down by geographic region. Topics include: climate change adaptation and carbon sequestration in coffee systems, biodiversity benefits of shade-grown coffee, farmer income diversification and food security through agroforestry, soil health, water conservation, and soil moisture, and policy frameworks and certification approaches supporting agroforestry.
“By making the science accessible, we can accelerate the transition to coffee landscapes that are shade-grown, climate-resilient, and farmer-centered,” states Coffee Watch Director Etelle Higonnet in the press release.
Future proofing coffee production will take a global effort, and the E-Library provides new levels of access to farmers looking to grow coffee in more sustainable ways. It is a very large and very necessary first step. For more information, visit Coffee Watch’s official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
