Update, solstice 2025 – New theme and redesign on the way!
The old custom theme on this site finally succumbed to advanced technology. All the content here is intact, it just looks sad and I don’t know how long it will take me to improve both the appearance and ease of use.
I made the first post on this website on this day in 2005. I initially envisioned a modest collection of resources explaining the importance of “shade-grown coffee” to biodiversity, birds in particular. As an ornithologist, I knew how critical wintering habitats in the tropics are to the birds that I studied here in North America. As a coffee drinker, I was frustrated and surprised that there was no single go-to place for consumers that would enable them (us!) to make an informed choice about what coffees were grown under ecologically-responsible methods. I thought I would just whip one up!
Here I am, fifteen years and hundreds of posts later. There were so many layers of nuance to explore: not only ecology, but also agronomy, economics, marketing, and the social and cultural aspects of coffee. I attended trade shows, and visited coffee farms. And drank a lot of coffee.
There has been so much evolution in the coffee world over these years. Consolidation among the big players in coffee buyers (often to private ownership) has made it nearly impossible for me to provide what I considered to be some of the most valuable data on this site: which corporations owned which brands, and how much certified or eco-certified coffee they purchased. A proliferation of certifications or sustainability claims, with increasingly copious criteria and similar but unequal definitions, has made my other crucial task — attempting to explain what these labels, standards, and seals mean to the consumer — tedious at best.
The coffee and product reviews have been fun, and I have especially enjoyed writing about birds and biodiversity. But the difficulty in updating information on certification standards and corporate ownership, purchasing, and sustainability issues that I consider the core of my mission has me uncertain as to the future of this site. So I’ve while had some long dry spells without posting, depending on what was going on in my own life, now I feel I am at a crossroad.
I welcome constructive comments on what direction this website should take as I ponder the future. Just leaving the site here indefinitely is likely not an option. Although I am now accepting donations, I haven’t tried very hard to monetize this site because my emphasis was on providing information, not making money. As a recent semi-involuntary retiree, I don’t think I can commit to supporting the site long-term.
Thank you, readers and friends, for this interesting journey. We’ll see where the future takes us.
A new course, Agriculture & Wildlife Conservation: Coffee Agroforestry, is being offered at the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability (EICES) at Columbia University in New York City. I was really pleased to learn that instructor Dr. Amanda Caudill, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, is utilizing materials from Coffee & Conservation in the course.
Classes are held in the evenings at Columbia University, or are available via Distance Learning. The Coffee Agroforestry course can be taken alone or as part of the Certificate Program in Conservation and Environmental Sustainability. More info here.
Here’s the course description:
Habitat destruction threatens wildlife existence worldwide. While preserving tropical forests is a necessity for biological conservation, this must be coupled with other conservation strategies to provide a sustainable solution for wildlife conservation. Coffee agroforestry, the intentional management of shade trees within coffee farms, has shown promise as a conversation strategy to support wildlife diversity. This course explores the relationship of coffee agroforestry and wildlife conservation. We will examine coffee farms as habitat through case studies, learn about socio-economics and environmental issues associated with coffee, and assess coffee certifications such as shade grown, organic, Rainforest Alliance, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly.
I’ve linked to Dr. Caudill’s work on biodiversity on coffee farms when it was featured in the New York Times in their Scientist at Work series. This sounds like a terrific course!
Annual recap of how much I spend on coffee in a yearI started this five years ago: I was curious about the variety of coffees I consumed, and particularly about how much I spent on coffee since price seems to be such a driving force when consumers are faced with choosing between cheap coffee and slightly higher priced certified/sustainable coffee. My recording method has been standardized since 2009, but I have refined the method used to calculate price per cup. I was basing it on tablespoons per bag and cup, and I prefer a ratio of coffee to water that is higher than typically recommended. I’ve now gone to using the common industry standard of 11 grams of coffee beans by weight per 6 fluid ounces of water. I have amended my previous calculations, too. Here are my 2012 stats (coffee for a 2-person household):
My four-year average (discarding 2008 stats) is 63 pounds of coffee a year at an average of $20.53/lb, and $0.50 per 6-oz cup, including shipping. This has been remarkably consistent over the years.
If I drank the same amount of coffee, but used only K-Cups, my annual cost would go from $1300 (average including shipping and some very high-priced, award winning coffees) to just over $2000! This was calculated using inexpensive Folgers K-Cups priced in bulk at Amazon (not only cheap, but one of the worst coffees you can buy in terms of sustainability). The cost only goes up with “better,” organic, or bold (stronger) K-Cups*. So if you are using K-Cups because it’s convenient, you are not only paying through the nose, you are producing landfill-choking waste one little non-recyclable K-Cup at a time. That’s asinine. And please don’t tell me you use a single-cup brewer so you don’t waste coffee. If you are wasting $700+ worth of coffee a year, something is seriously wrong.
I think I’ve shown that “But I can’t find organic/Bird-Friendly/Rainforest Alliance/etc. coffee around here” is a poor excuse for not drinking it. My shipping costs — with nearly all my coffee purchased online — have averaged less than $130 a year (or $2.50/wk). It’s not hard to find free or reduced shipping specials, or flat rate shipping, online. You could get Smithsonian Bird-Friendly/organic certified coffee automatically delivered to you once a month from Birds and Beans for $105/year (even more variety from Birds and Beans Canada). Or design your own monthly coffee delivery from any of Caribou Coffee’s 100% Rainforest Alliance certified varieties for $75/year. Or buy more coffee locally than I do. For example, Birds and Beans is expanding nationwide, and if you don’t have a Caribou store near you, many retailers like Target carry it. Ask your local retailer to carry your own favorite eco-certified coffees!
Great coffee that helps support ecosystems and rural communities worldwide is not too expensive for all of us to enjoy. You can calculate how much a cup of coffee costs, based on the price of a bag of beans, using the spreadsheet below.
*You can fiddle with the math yourself. Regular K-Cups hold 9 grams, other types hold varying amounts. There are about 454 grams in a pound, so about 50 K-Cups to a pound.
Annual recap of how much I spend on coffee in a yearI started this several years ago, and I think the method has now been more or less standardized. See below for previous results and caveats.
This year, coffee prices were higher, but I was able to spend a little less on shipping due to taking advantage of specials, or buying more bags per order. Here are my 2011 stats:
My three-year average (discarding 2008 stats) is 62 pounds of coffee a year at an average of just over$20/lb, and $0.49 per 6-oz cup, including shipping.
As I’ve said previously, great coffee that helps support ecosystems and rural communities worldwide is not too expensive for all of us to enjoy.
I’ve posted this before, but if you’d like to calculate how much a cup of coffee costs, based on the price of a bag of beans, just punch in the price and weight of the bag here:
What might a stroll through the Coffee & Conservation 2011 referrer logs and stats tell us about what coffee readers are interested in ?
Here are the top 10 posts of 2011:
Okay, so people who come here are obsessed with Keurig brewers, and ways to avoid K-Cups. Not apparent until you click through to the posts is the fact that none of them was actually written in 2011. I’ll take that as a sign that I have a deep bench. Considering more recent history, here are the most popular posts I wrote this past year:
Hopefully, the cost-conscious, single-serve brewer folks pick up some other worthwhile information while they are here. The following list is what I consider to be the most important or interesting of 2011, the ones I hope people read:
I have a couple more lists coming up: my annual review of the cost of all the great coffee I drank in 2011, and my favorite coffees of the year and what they told me about my tastes.
Happy New Year!
One of my fellow Audubon Guides bloggers, Laura Kammermeier, has jumped on the sustainable-coffee bandwagon, and has been encouraging her readers, including those of the American Birding Association blog, to do so as well.
If you landed here at Coffee & Conservation from Laura’s efforts, welcome! There is a lot of information on this site about the complex issue of sustainable coffee production. Here’s a quick guide to some of the areas you might want to start exploring:
No excuses. Here’s where you can get certified Bird-Friendly coffee. Yes, it costs a little more (why should we expect farmers in the developing world to help preserve biodiversity and not be willing to pay for it?). But even if you have to pay shipping, it’s still very inexpensive — calculate it yourself right here. If you’re a birder, you probably routinely buy optics, field guides, go on bird trips, or even hop in the car to chase a new bird across the state. How can we not afford cup of coffee that won’t doom the birds we love to see?
For more links to background information, click on the User Guide tab at the top of the page.
The highly-caffeinated main tasting panel at Coffee & Conservation wishes you a happy holiday and many excellent, sustainable coffees in the New Year! Standing are Mike, my better half Darrin, and Rick; yours truly is seated with our newest regular panelist Dana on my lap. Honest, I did have a coffee mug in my other hand!
Darren Rowse ran a little experiment on his excellent site, ProBlogger, last weekend. He invited folks to promote their blogs in 140 characters or less. There were 1400 responses, and Darren picked 10 of his favorite pitches. First on his list was…
Are your beans for the birds? Learn about eco-friendly, sustainable coffee, and how your morning cup can change the world.
If you are reading this because you were also intrigued by my pitch, welcome! I know Coffee & Conservation can be a little daunting. How could there be so much material on sustainable coffee?! Where should you begin?
First, a brief bit about why I believe that making the choice to drink sustainable coffee can bring real change to the world. Then please visit the User Guide for a list of background posts that help you understand what defines sustainable coffee. They include What is shade coffee? and What is sun coffee and why is it a problem? You may also want to check out the post on the coffee crisis (why cheap coffee is being grown on sun plantations) and how this cheap coffee perpetuates poverty. If you only read one post here and put what you learn into action, make it The Top 5 Indicators of Sustainable Coffee.
I hope ProBlogger readers find this site useful — and I welcome feedback.
Coffee cup photo based on an image by Klaus Post.
Dave’s Garden is an enormous web site that covers every issue of interest to gardeners. The site just had a feature article on shade coffee by Marna Towne. Marna hits all the high points to introduce DG users to this important issue. And this is no small audience: DG has over 400,000 registered users and can get nearly 2 million hits a month! Many thanks to Marna for doing this piece, and asking me to provide some information and photos.
So welcome Dave’s Garden readers! Please visit the User Guide for a list of the important background posts. If you only read one post here, make it The Top 5 Indicators of Sustainable Coffee.
Marna’s article covered some of the information in What is shade coffee? and What is sun coffee and why is it a problem? You may also want to check out the post on the coffee crisis (why cheap coffee is being grown on sun plantations) and an example of illegal coffee growing in a national park (how it ends up in common grocery store brands).
I hope Dave’s Garden readers find this site useful — and I welcome feedback — and that Coffee & Conservation readers head over to DG to check out all the incredible resources there!
My husband and I are in the highlands of Panama, in Chiriqui province (in yellow on the first map) near the Costa Rican border. We are staying near the city of Volcan, on the western flank of Volcan Baru at about 1500 meters (5000 feet) . Chiriqui is the main coffee growing area in Panama. Boquete is on the other side of the volcano, but there are plenty of farms all around us, including Finca Hartmann and Carmen Estate, whose coffees we’ve both reviewed.
We have coffee shrubs growing on our rented property, and as it is harvest season here, the cherries are ripe. I tasted the pulp, and it’s very sweet, but sparse. I can now see how tenacious the mucilaginous coating on the beans is, and it really helps me understand the why and how of wet processing coffee. I’ll try to take a little video of I can. We plan on visiting at least one coffee farm, and I will also post photos of the area as I have the opportunity.
Warm wishes on the winter solstice, from the main jury members of the Coffee & Conservation tasting panel.
Mike (Risky Kingbird), Greg (Star[bucks]ling), Terry (Coal Tit), Julie (BirdBarista), and Darrin (Kingfisher). Ordinary people!
One of my main goals here at C&C is not only to provide background information so that consumers can choose coffee that does not harm biodiversity, but to do some of the heavy lifting myself. I’ve been as conscientious as possible in researching roasters that carry sustainable coffees. There is a drawback to mail ordering coffee, and that is shipping costs and, something that personally bothers me a lot, the environmental costs of the fossil fuel use required for the shipping. This is especially onerous with coffee, because unless you buy green beans, you can’t buy much more coffee than you can drink in two weeks or so. It just defeats the purpose to buy freshly roasted coffee and not drink it at peak freshness.
So, I’ve tried to research and try out roasters from far and wide. Below is an interactive map to the roasters I’ve examined so far that meet the criteria described in a previous post; not every coffee from each roaster is sustainable, but all have at least a few offerings that come from biodiversity-friendly sources. If there are multiple qualified roasters in the same city, I’ve only listed the ones I’ve tried, or that have the highest-rated coffee.
Hover over the markers for the name of the roaster, click on the markers for name, location, web site, and notes. If it’s an orange marker, a street address is given, and it’s a location you can visit (retail store or cafe), mail order only places are green. If there are multiple locations, that’s noted, too (the note will say "retail" if the coffees are available at grocers, coops, etc.). You can zoom and pan. You can also visit the map at Zee Maps, and click on "List" in the upper right corner for a color-coded list of names.
Explore and choose a roaster near you! (I know I have quite a few readers in Europe and Australia…I’ll try to add some more roasters in those regions in the future.)