Climate change / Coffee and the environment

Coffee farms and carbon sequestration

In my post, “Why certifying shade coffee is so complex,” I ended with a comment regarding the upside-down nature of shade (or organic) certification. That is, the burden of certification costs are on the producers who are doing the right thing, rather than on the producers who are damaging the environment. Small producers, who are more likely to preserve forests and grow coffee under diverse shade (both of which enhance biodiversity) and are less likely to use chemicals, are the least able to afford certification.

I’ve been ruminating about this ever since, and wondered if some sort of “cap and trade” system might be helpful. What I had in mind were “credits” for forest or habitat preservation and enhancement small eco-friendly farms could “sell” to naughty sun coffee growers. This was inspired by a similar system: carbon credits. So while I let this idea simmer, it’s worthwhile to briefly discuss the role of carbon credits themselves, and their potential to generate income for farmers practicing sustainable agriculture, including shade coffee.

Quick primer on terrestrial carbon sequestration
Trees (and other plants) sequester carbon by removing it from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and incorporating into their tissues. Existing forests are carbon sinks (or ”carbon storage units”) and contain over half of the terrestrial carbon in the world. Carbon remains stored in plant tissues until released, in this case most often by burning and decomposition.  Agroforestry systems, including shade coffee farms, that preserve forest are therefore acting as carbon sinks.

Reforestation also contributes to the sequestration of carbon, although the rate in which carbon is taken up and stored by plants varies among species, as well as where they are grown and if and how they are managed. This means that sun coffee farms converted to shade in which the appropriate tree species are planted and managed have the potential to effectively sequester carbon.

Carbon is also stored in leaf litter and other organic matter in the soil. Sustainable coffee agrosystems frequently rely on fallen leaves from their shade trees as well as the application of coffee skins and other organic matter for soil moisture retention and fertilization, providing another means in which these farms can contribute to carbon sequestration.

How much carbon can coffee farms store?
Although measuring carbon storage is difficult due to the multiple variables involved (even plots in the same region with similar tree species composition can vary in their storage capacity depending on microclimate, soil types, etc.), recent research has revealed some encouraging facts. A few examples:

  • In the tropics, potential carbon sequestration rates for smallholder, sustainable agroforestry systems range from 1.5 to 3.5 megagrams (tonnes) per hectare per year, or 2.1 billion megagrams annually worldwide.
  • It has been estimated that each hectare of sustainable agroforestry in the tropics could potentially offset 5 to 20 ha of deforestation.
  • Models have estimated a 5-year-old coffee farm shaded with two common Latin American tree species (Erythrina poeppigiana and Cordia alliodora) could sequester 5.3 megagrams per hectare.
  • Soil carbon stocks in shade coffee were 60% of that expected in primary forest in Sumatra, versus 45% for sun coffee.
  • In El Salvador, carbon sequestration values for various types of shade coffee management were estimated (in tons per ha per year): 174 for rustic shade to 77 for shade monoculture.
  • A study of carbon stocks in Costa Rican coffee farms calculated aerial (above ground) carbon stocks ranging from 11 megagrams per ha for simple shade (one heavily pruned shade species) to nearly 32 for diverse shade.
  • Using these figures, a farmer with 10 ha in diversified shade coffee could receive a one-time $3000 payment (based on previously carbon transactions for the country), as well as a reduction in expenses from chemical inputs and have timber and fruit for additional income. The payment is over three times greater than would be obtained for the carbon stocks in simple shade coffee systems.

The non-profit TechnoServe is exploring the use of carbon credit trading for promoting sustainable agroforestry, using a Guatemalan coffee cooperative (more here). Small holders in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico, are gaining access to carbon credit funds to pay for sustainable agroforestry there, where a great deal of coffee is grown (more here).

It appears sustainable coffee agroforestry can play a role in helping to mitigate global climate change through carbon sequestration, and in the process also provide additional income and further incentive to growing shade coffee. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing much more about this in the future.

More reading, including sources for the figures above:

  • Smallholder agroforestry projects: Potential for carbon sequestration and poverty alleviation. O. J. Cacho, G. R. Marshall, and M. Milne. 2003.  ESA Working Paper No. 03-06. Agricultural and Development Economics Division, The Food and Agriculture Organizationof the United Nations.
  • Carbon sequestration in tropical and temperate agroforestry systems: a review with examples from Costa Rica and southern Canada. M. Oelbermann, R. P. Voroney, and A. M. Gordon. 2004. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 104: 359-377.
  • Carbon sequestration: An underexploited environmental benefit of agroforestry systems. F. Montagnini and P. K. R. Nair. 2004. Agroforestry Systems 61:281-295.
  • Carbon stock assessment for a forest-to-coffee conversion landscape in Sumber-Jaya (Lampung, Indonesia): from allometric equations to land use change analysis. M. van Noordwijk, S. Rahayu, K. Hairiah, Y. C. Wulan, A. Farida, and. B. Verbist. 2002. Science in China (PDF here).
  • Carbon sequestration in coffee agroforestry plantations of Central America. 21st International Conference on Coffee Science, 2006.
  • Sustainability in the coffee sector: exploring opportunities for international cooperation. U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. 2003. (PDF here)
  • Carbon Storage in Coffee Agroecosystems of Southern Costa Rica: Potential Applications for the Clean Development Mechanism. C. Polzot. 2004. M.S. thesis, York University, Toronto.  Includes excellent cited information on the mechanisms of carbon sequestration in agroforestry systems, and Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services programs.

Retail and specialty roasters

Einstein’s Bros. and Noah’s coffees

[This post for background only: Einstein and allied stores were acquired by JAB Holding in 2014 as part of a large buy-up of coffee companies.]

In honor of leap day/year, Einstein Bros. Bagels and Noah’s Bagels, both owned by Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc., are offering regular coffee for 29 cents on February 29 only if you say “Happy Leap Day” to the person taking your order.

Researching corporate coffee sourcing is difficult and generally unrewarding, although my goal is to eventually cover as many of the popular chains as I can. This promotion prompted me to take a look at Einstein’s. Einstein Noah Restaurant Group has five independent brands and 600 stores in the U.S. The most numerous are Einstein’s (300 locations) and Noah’s, and I’ll concentrate on those since they are offering the cheap coffee promotion.

Background and suppliers
ENRG acquired Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea in 1996, which served as the company coffee supplier. However, it was sold in 2004. (The ENRG corporate site briefly mentions that the company has its own coffee roasting plant; I believe this was the Willoughby’s plant and that the information is out-of-date.) The latest annual report states that “all our coffee is purchased through a sole-sourced third party provider.” A later quarterly SEC filing notes that this source was under contract through 2007, and a second supplier is contracted for 2008.

The first supplier is Coffee Bean International. CBI is an Oregon-based supplier to coffee houses and retailers across North America. Last year, CBI was acquired by Farmer Bros. Co., an institutional coffee supplier. They describe themselves as a high-volume roaster, not a specialty coffee roaster, hence the CBI acquisition. CBI is to remain independent (ergo, Farmer Bros. may be the “second” supplier”). Farmer Bros. I’m less impressed with. There is not much detail on their coffee sourcing on their web site aside from the usual uninformative “Colombian blend” and “100% arabica” descriptions. Nothing about organic, Fair Trade, or other sustainable or certified coffees. In their investor information, they list their main competition as the nasty multi-nationals, which puts them in a different (and worse) league as CBI.

Farmer Bros. declared it won’t change the way CBI sources its coffee. The question is how much more Einstein’s and Noah’s will purchase from the lower-end Farmer Bros. offerings, versus CBI.

The bottom line on sustainability
CBI, apparently the main supplier of Einstein’s and Noah’s coffees, has a decent level of transparency. Granted, a number of the sources are highly likely to be sun-coffee growers, such as the Colombia and Costa Rica. Others in CBI’s organic line are likely to be more sustainable, such as their Mexican and perhaps Guatemalan coffees. The trouble is, of course, that you have no idea which source goes into the typical offerings at the retail level. Einstein’s has five daily brews, including their Neighborhood Blend and similarly generic-named coffees. Noah’s has four daily offerings, all unhelpfully named after New York neighborhoods.

However, each has a Fair Trade/certified organic coffee (which I believe is the same blend): Global Village at Einstein’s and Tribeca Blend at Noah’s. They are created by CBI, from Latin American, African, and Asian coffees. Cross-referencing that with CBI’s organic selections, we can guess that the Latin American component is from Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru (the latter grows a lot of sun coffee, even organic). The Asian is almost surely Sumatran. There are no organic African coffees listed, but of their conventional African sources the most likely country they’d obtain FT/O from would be Ethiopia.

Thus, the Global Village/Tribeca FT/O coffee seems to be the most sustainable choice, certainly better than whatever Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Eleven is dolling out.  Whether these blends will be available as a 29 cent selection tomorrow, I don’t know. I suggest asking for it, and encouraging both Einstein’s and Noah’s to offer more sustainable coffees on a daily basis. Let them know it’s important to you!

Research on coffee growing

Blogging bird and coffee research

At the Partners in Flight 4th International Conference

Background
Wearing my occupational hat as an ornithologist, I just attended the Partners in Flight (PIF) conference in south Texas. PIF is a consortium of conservation agencies and organizations that partner to conserve birds — the emphasis is often on migratory landbirds. Because these birds do not recognize human boundaries, cross-border cooperation is a hallmark of PIF.

Coffee in the paper sessions
The first day, I attended a full-day symposia on conservation projects in Central America. Several described the identification of Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Each speaker identified “sustainable agriculture” and “promotion of high-value cash crops” as a priority means of conserving these key bird conservation sites. Maps of the regions all showed IBAs which included areas whose primary land use was coffee production.

Another researcher looked at whether shade coffee might be a threat to forest birds. She examined whether chickens, always a familiar site wandering around in diverse farms in the tropics, could harbor disease that is passed on to forest birds. The chickens in her study did harbor various signs of diseases (though at a much lower level than “industrial” fowl), and some species of forest birds also showed evidence of exposure to them. However, there was no sign that there was increased mortality or an effect on population, since contact between chickens and forest birds was pretty limited.

The highlight of the meeting for me was an entire morning devoted to a dedicated shade coffee symposia, led by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. I have written up the abstracts on the papers presented (download as a Word doc), and will incorporate this information in future posts.

Here I’d like to mention a theme that popped up in much of the research and dominated the discussion section: the importance of forest fragments in coffee farms and coffee-growing regions in general.

There was wide agreement that remnants of forest in or adjacent to coffee farms were vital to the preservation of biodiversity. These can be more important than the managed shade on the farm, especially if shade trees are sparse or of only one or a few species.  A researcher from Costa Rica talked about how many farms there planted small plots of sun coffee and used forested strips (planted or natural) as windbreaks. A Colombian researcher said that in some regions there was so much cloud cover that coffee could not be grown under any type of canopy, but the forested patches owned by the farmers harbored many forest birds. Neither of these farm types would qualify for shade certification, but the forest fragments were critical refugia for birds and other fauna.

The question that arose was how could farmers be rewarded for preserving these patches? And what if they did not own adjacent forest, such as protected areas owned by the government? So many tropical parks are “protected” only on paper, and local people do not see the benefit in a hands-off approach. Could there be away to provide incentive for stewardship of these forests as well, by incorporating that into shade certification criteria as well?

Other certification challenges were discussed as well, but I will leave some for future posts.

As I have written about before, Cerulean Warblers are a declining migratory species often associated with shade coffee, and they have been the subject of several papers. Both the American Bird Conservancy and their Colombian partner ProAves have booths in the exhibit hall. I have written about their efforts to preserve Cerulean Warbler habitat, including shade coffee farms, and their Cerulean Warbler Conservation Coffee. This coffee has been sold out for quite awhile, but they now have a new crop which has just been roasted by Thanksgiving Coffee Company, the roaster partner in this worthy endeavor.

And, yes — this conference only served sustainable coffee. Caffe Ibis is the exclusive provider, and all participants were told to bring their own mugs! Randy Wirth, co-owner and roaster of Caffe Ibis, gave a talk about his work in sustainable coffee, from visiting many of his sources (often multiple times), and his tireless work with both consumers and the coffee industry to promote and inform about sustainable coffee. We have many similar ideas about this issue, and I hope to have an opportunity to interview him for C&C some time in the future.

Look for other news and thoughts coming out of the PIF conference in future posts!

Birds and other biodiversity / Research on coffee growing

Research: Spiders on Indian coffee farms

Kapoor, V. (2008). Effects of rainforest fragmentation and shade-coffee plantations on spider communities in the Western Ghats, India. Journal of Insect Conservation, 12(1), 53-68.

Ants and butterflies are often the two most studied arthropods on coffee farms, so it was nice to see a paper looking at spiders. The study took place in Tamil Nadu and Kerala states in areas of mid-elevation tropical wet evergreen rainforest that had tea, coffee, and cardamom plantation surrounded by the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary. The authors examined the community structure of spiders in two organic shade coffee farms and ten rainforest fragments of various sizes that were also under varying degrees of degradation.

Most of the study discussed the impact (or lack thereof) of fragment size on spider communities. Results regarding the shade coffee farms were limited. First, both of the coffee farms had similar spider density. The species composition in the two farms were more similar to each other than to other fragment types, but one farm did have higher species richness than the other. The author began by noting that the farm with higher richness had more native shade trees, versus the monoculture of non-native Eucalyptus in the other farm. That would be notable, except that the author went on to say that the first farm adjoined two forest fragments, while the other had poor connectivity. This is likely to have a strong effect on spiders with their relatively limited dispersal ability. Another factor mentioned by the author was that the coffee trees in the first (richer) farm were “much taller” than in the other farm. However, the sampling took place in the herbaceous and shrub layer up to 1.6 m, which is not very tall for a coffee tree, so it is unclear to me how this variable may have influenced the results.

One spider species was noted as being commonly found in undisturbed sites but absent from the coffee farms, while three types of spiders were more common in disturbed sites and the coffee farms. Unfortunately, “disturbance” was not specifically defined. Finally, the author admitted there is virtually no information on the natural history of spiders in the Western Ghats, and said this lack of data hindered using them as indicators of habitat disturbance.

Spiders do have many life-history features that should make them good habitat barometers. Despite some shortcomings, this study was a first step in examining spider communities in forested agrosystems. The results also at least suggested that shade coffee farms in this region are utilized more like “disturbed” than pristine sites by spiders, and that these spider communities may show responses similar to those documented for other organisms to forest connectivity and shade management of coffee farms.

Photo of Nephila pilipes, one of the spiders found in this study, by amateur_photo_bore; thanks for publishing under a Creative Commons license.

V. Kapoor. (2007). Effects of rainforest fragmentation and shade-coffee plantations on spider communities in the Western Ghats, India Journal of Insect Conservation, 12 (1), 53-68 DOI: 10.1007/s10841-006-9062-5