Shade Grown Coffee Promotes Biodiversity

Shade grown coffee is generally better tasting and a more ecologically sound method of growing coffee, even if it adds a bit to the cost. The fact that the coffee can be grown without massive deforestation alone makes it a better method of growing coffee since it helps to preserve trees which sequester carbon and secure the soil when it rains.

But a recent article in the journal Current Biology (subscription only) shows that shade grown coffee also helps preserve biodiversity. From the article summary:

Coffee is cultivated across 11 million hectares (ha) of land within the world's richest centers of terrestrial biodiversity [1]. In tropical America, coffee is traditionally grown under a diverse canopy of overstory shade trees, which enhances the quality of the coffee farm as a conservation matrix and supports a broad spectrum of pollinators that increase fruit set per bush [2], [3] and [4]. Unlike sun coffee monocultures, shade coffee also sustains a diverse array of vertebrates, including bats and migratory birds, which provide farmers with many ecological services, such as insect predation [5], and may also conserve seed dispersal processes necessary for native tree re-establishment [6]. However, little is known about the capacity of shade coffee farms to maintain gene flow and genetic diversity of remnant tree populations across this common tropical landscape. In this study, we conducted genetic analyses that reveal recent colonization and extensive gene flow of a native tree species in shade coffee farms in Chiapas, Mexico. The high genetic diversity and overlapping deme structure of the colonizing trees also show that traditional coffee farms maintain genetic connectivity with adjacent habitats and can serve as foci of forest regeneration.

For those unclear on the concept, biodiversity makes an ecosystem more robust and less succeptable to disruption by diseases, pests, climate changes and other factors. Simply put, as a first approximation, the simpler the ecosystem, the less stable it is. The more diverse the ecosystem, both in terms of species and genetic variation within species, the more stable and productive it is. Shade grown coffee both preserves this stability and benefits from it.

Additionally, this allows shade grown coffee to also serve as potential foci of native forest regeneration in deforested areas.

I know Trader Joe's sells shade grown coffee, and really good stuff it is!

Audobon also has a list of sources for shade grown coffee.

Currently Joy and I mostly drink coffee from Equal Exchange sold through our local food co-op (which is the largest food co-op in the nation!), which keeps the cost down very nicely. Before joining the co-op, we bought our coffee from Dean's Beans, which I think sells shade grown...I know it is organic and fair trade! They were the cheapest high quality coffee we could find until joining the co-op.