Coffee news and miscellany

Coffee news and miscellany

Sips: Site updates

First, a general housekeeping update. A couple months ago, I had to re-do the appearance of C&C due to a theme implosion. The temporary one was awful, but I’ve now tidied things up considerably. There are no doubt still a fair number of startling font sizes, misaligned bullet points, peculiar spacing, and the like, but progress has been made. As I worked on code, I also edited and refreshed posts and links. A lot of this would not be obvious unless you came upon a post in which I made updates. Thus, I will provide some highlights by resurrecting the “Sips” news briefs, and link to the older material. I’ll begin with research that has been highlighted in the excellent Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.

  • Daily Coffee News had a story (January 2025) about recent research confirming that the fungicides used to combat coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), known as “la roya”, have health risks to farm workers applying them to coffee in Brazil. Full use of personal protective equipment was reported by only 23% of farm workers, and health impacts revealed disruption to endocrine and metabolic functions. My posts on coffee leaf rust include this overview of the disease, the impact it has had on organic coffee, and other overall impacts. The study summarized by Daily Coffee News is cited below, and is open access.
  • Sticking with Brazil, the journal Nature Conservation (January 2026, citation below) published a lengthy and detailed review of the dire habitat destruction in the Brazilian cerrado region. I wrote an overview of coffee growing in the Brazilian cerrado, and in the ensuing years the crisis has grown. Over 55% of the native vegetation has now been destroyed. Agricultural expansion, especially in the coffee growing regions, is an important reason, although coffee is not the only agricultural product grown there. The paper provides an excellent analysis of the biodiversity of the area, which unique species are at risk, the extent and source of threats, impediments to conservation, etc.
  • Although arabica coffee is self-pollinating, cross-pollination by insects improves fruit set and yields. I’ve written several posts on this topic, including how coffee grown in shade provides habitat for pollinators, how shade coffee specifically benefits suites of bees in Mexico, and even the status of bees as pollinators of robusta coffee in India. This story, again at Daily Coffee News (January 2026) and featuring Brazilian research, summarizes the use of managed colonies of a species of stingless bees on sun coffee farms, their impact on yield (it increased), and the uptake (traces were found) in coffee leaves, pollen and nectar of neonicotinoid pesticide applied to the soil (citation below). The Daily Coffee News story also referenced another meta-study (2022) of the impacts of bees and other pollinators on coffee yield worldwide. I’ve included that citation below as well.
  • I have also written an overview of coffee growing in China, as well as an update. Daily Coffee News (Janaury 2026) summarized how models utilizing machine learning can analyze satelite images to map land growing coffee. Also cited below.
Marciano LPA, Kleinstreuer N, Chang X, Costa LF, Silvério ACP, Martins I. 2024. A novel approach to triazole fungicides risk characterization: Bridging human biomonitoring and computational toxicology. Sci Total Environ.953:176003. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.176003.

Pereira, C. C., W. Kenedy-Siqueira, L. R. Maia, V. da F. Sperandei, L. Arantes-Garcia, S. Fernandes, G. F. C. Fernandes. 2026. The Cerrado crisis review: highlighting threats and providing future pathways to save Brazil’s biodiversity hotspot. Nature Conservation 61: 29–70.

Ramos JD, Santos GS, dos Santos CF, De Oliveira Kaminski TS, Cione AP, Alves DA, Quenzer FCL, Campbell AJ, Pereira AM, Thompson H, Martins de Queiroz AC, Bento JMS and Menezes C. 2026. Stingless bees in coffee: yield gains and assessing neonicotinoid impact. Front. Bee Sci. 3:1644205. doi: 10.3389/frbee.2025.1644205.

Moreaux, Céline, et al. 2022. The value of biotic pollination and dense forest for fruit set of Arabica coffee: A global assessment. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 323: 107680.

Huang Q, Cheng X, Chen Y, Ding X and Jia H. 2025. Coffee extraction from remote sensing imagery based on multiple features: a case study of Pu’er City, China. Front. Remote Sens. 6:1696570. doi: 10.3389/frsen.2025.1696570

 

Coffee news and miscellany

Sips

I’ve been keeping up with many important developments in the world of sustainable coffee. Here are the ones you should be reading:

Regarding coffee certifications:

Regarding shade-grown coffee in particular:

Regarding the dangers of cheap coffee and the current frightening drop in the price of commodity coffee:

We’ve been here before and the results are catastrophic for farmers and have a ripple effect throughout economies. Read my piece about corporate coffee for an overview.

And also:

Coffee news and miscellany

Sips: Recent coffee-related news

A short round-up of coffee news.

Coffee news and miscellany

Finca Dos Gatos: 2015 update

Regular readers may recall that I have done a series of posts on my experiment with growing coffee here at home. All of our trees were ready-to-harvestgrown from seed collected at various coffee farms we have visited in our travels. In honor of our two cats, we named our growing collection “Finca Dos Gatos.” Past posts are:

Since that last post, we moved, necessitating some adjustments to our set-up. Mainly, it was getting hard to manage the larger trees. So we have given a number of them away, including a couple to people who have greenhouses. I left myself with a few favorites.

The current inventory consists of:

Recently stumped coffee tree.

Recently stumped coffee tree.

  • Two trees from Finca Hartmann, Santa Clara, Panama, 2008. I have already had to prune (behead) both of these, they were just getting too large. One I’ve done twice, the last time just recently; it is currently a stump. The other I did last year, and it has a lot of new growth.
  • Finca Esperanza Verde, San Ramon, Nicaragua, 2009. One large tree from which we just harvested a crop of cherries.
  • El Jaguar, Jinotega, Nicaragua, 2011. A yellow caturra or catuai.
  • Selva Negra, Jinotega, Nicaragua, 2011. From a feral plant growing in the cloud forest reserve there, along the exact part of the trail where I saw my first Resplendent Quetzals.
  • A stumped tree after about a year of re-growth.

    A stumped tree after about a year of re-growth.

    Near Pico Bonito, outside La Ceiba, Honduras, 2011. This is a catimor that was growing at a lower elevation.

  • A couple of seedlings from some of the fruit I harvested.

Some new lessons

One critical issue I ran into after the move was water. We have well water here with a very high iron and mineral content, so it goes through a water softener. With everything that was going on, I did not give this proper consideration, and after a few months of watering with the softened water, the plants really suffered. I didn’t do lasting damage, but did end up watering only with rain water or jugs of good old Detroit city water I lugged home from work.

New growth on the catimor is a nice bronze color.

New growth on the catimor is a nice bronze color.

We still put the coffee outside in the summer, but our deck faces west and gets sun even under the overhang late in the day. I have learned that just like the veggies started indoors, coffee needs to be “hardened off” when going outside. They need protection from direct sunlight for a couple weeks; the leaves scorch easily. After awhile they can stand more sun, but not for long periods, especially in hot weather.

Finally, they still live under lights from about September through May. My previous system used a four-bulb fluorescent fixture with 6500K blue spectrum lights. To induce blooming, I withheld most water for a few weeks, then watered like crazy, and switched out half the lights to 3000K red spectrum bulbs. Now that I have fewer trees and a nice room that gets good sunlight, I use just a single full-spectrum 60 watt bulb hanging within two feet of the trees. This is a great, inexpensive alternative, especially if you have only a few plants. The four-foot fixture provides more even and brighter light, but my southern exposure makes up the difference.

I’ve had plenty of fruit from these trees, although any given harvest isn’t really enough to roast itself. I’ve accumulated enough now that we could make a couple cups, but given that some of the green beans have been sitting in a cupboard for a couple years, I’m not sure how tasty the final result would be. Once the younger trees start producing good crops in two years, I’ll coordinate the flowering of all of them and see if I can’t do a proper harvest, processing, roasting, and tasting!

cherry

The latest pickings.