‘THE AGRO WOMEN OF SANTA BARBARA COUTY’
SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT - JULY 2, 2020
Story By: Ninette Paloma
Photo By: Ninette Paloma
In 1984, during the heart of the historic farm crisis that swept across much of the nation, it was impossible to turn on the television without witnessing the fallout of an industry brought to its knees seemingly overnight. Through a perfect storm of government policy, distressing weather conditions, and high interest rates, farmland value had dropped a monstrous 60 percent in some parts of the Midwest, while farm debt soared to over $215 billion.
Images of men with hats in their hands gazing over foreclosure signs flooded the networks. Journalists spoke grimly about the mental-health impact on male farmers, reporting on the spiraling number of suicides, homicides, and cases of domestic violence. The year had ushered in a grim portrait of America’s heartland, and U.S. farming as we once knew it seemed poised for a seismic shift.
Mushrooming out of the shadows of fiercely private communities, that change came in the form of the under-acknowledged female farmer. Once thought to play little more than a supportive role in the agro-industry, these women led the charge toward operational changes, implementing viable solutions that would effectively help to curtail a burgeoning crisis.
“Many farm women had experienced the first-hand implications of 1970s-style agriculture: the dangers of borrowing large amounts of money, the costs of purchasing expensive inputs, and the constant stress of being on this treadmill to ruin,” wrote author Mark Friedberger in Agricultural History: American Rural and Farm Women in Historical Perspective. “They knew this was no way to farm and they made sure their husbands knew it, too.”
Agricultural historians would call this era “the time of female transformation,” with farm communities adopting a more egalitarian approach to leadership that would reap tangible benefits in the decades to come. “Farm women and their allies brought a fresh impetus to the difficult task of working through problems previously addressed by males behind closed doors,” added Friedberger. “[They] had a decisive impact on power relationships on and off the farm, and also steered the farm community toward new attitudes about farming and the land.”
According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s latest census, women now make up 36 percent of all reported U.S. farmers — a 27 percent increase from 2012. California itself boasts a top-five position in the number of female producers, and in Santa Barbara County, that diversity adds up to an agricultural landscape as wide-ranging as the $1 billion-plus industry itself.
“Just take a look around our farmers’ market,” said Noey Turk of Yes Yes Nursery. “It’s probably the most diverse and balanced group of farmers you’ll ever encounter, with some of the most inspiring women I’ve ever met.”
Like Turk, many of these women have come from a storied lineage of agricultural producers, shifting with both literal and figurative climates to adapt to an ever-evolving market. Others, like Anna deLaski of Solminer vineyards, are newcomers lured in by the prospect of connecting to the land in a lasting and impactful way. And some, like Sara Rotman of Busy Bee’s Organics, turned to farming out of sheer necessity, cultivating medicinal plants to help alleviate severe ailments.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Santa Barbara County’s agro women forged ahead, adjusting their approaches to reflect a fast-changing crisis much like their predecessors had done almost four decades earlier. Farmers with wildly diverse productions described similar challenges or sources of inspiration: agricultural teachings to help fuel the industry for generations to come. I asked them to offer up a little occupational wisdom, and their answers read more like life lessons than formulaic business advice. Both our initial conversations and current updates are included; an education in fluidity and inclusivity revealed between arduous chores and blossoming fields, and undeniably steeped in the female experience.
1. Make It a Family Affair
Remy Becker is carefully arranging tidy piles of fresh hay when she jumps up suddenly with an idea. “Want to take the goats for a walk with me?” she asks eagerly, and though I’ve never herded anything more than a group of raucous girlfriends on a Saturday night, I nod my head in agreement. The goats, it turns out, are much easier to maneuver.
I’m spending the afternoon at Valley Heart Ranch, a 10-acre property with killer views of the Pacific that also holds the distinction of being Montecito’s first coffee plantation. Ten-year-old Remy Becker is the property’s youngest farmhand, dedicating her afternoons and weekends to mucking stalls and grooming her two miniature rescue ponies, Regina and Clementine, while balancing schoolwork and an active equestrian schedule. Her mom, Kirsten Becker, sees it as a perfect opportunity to encourage an active lifestyle firmly rooted to the land. “When we lost our home in the mudslides, suddenly the need to nurture and feel nurtured became central to our family,” she recalled. “I had no background in farming, but I love hard work. And, boy, I learned quickly.”
With roughly 4,000 plants and a handful of varietals with fancy-sounding names such as Catuai Rojo and Geisha, the Beckers hope to foster a symbiotic relationship between the ranch and their Haley Corridor property The Mill, collaborating with area artisans to begin marketing the fruits of their labor. Asked whether she minds the early-morning hours and labor-intensive lifestyle, Kirsten paused thoughtfully. “It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure,” she said after a moment. “But being surrounded by family and animals and Mother Nature feels soulful in a way that I could have never imagined.”
Sixth-generation farmer Clara Cadwell of Tutti Frutti Farms agrees. She and her siblings have been running the family business alongside their dad ever since she could remember, braiding garlic and selling organic produce at the Saturday farmers’ market as kids and driving the tractor and overseeing certification as adults. “My dad used to make a game of it, telling us if we sold all of the cherry tomatoes, he’d take us to the movies,” she recalled.
Most recently, Tutti Frutti Farms has partnered up with the Pilgrim Terrace Community Gardens, where Cadwell hosts youth garden tours, focusing heavily on nutrition and seasonality. “There’s nothing more enriching than kids being outside using their energy and bodies in a way that extends beyond the classroom,” she emphasized. “There’s so much wonder outdoors, and it’s so empowering to know you have the ability to raise your own food.”
The harvest season roared in with as much fervor as the pandemic itself, and both the Beckers and Cadwells set to work securing a full field staff for the task. For Kirsten, that meant recruiting her entire brood, who rolled up their sleeves to pick coffee cherries and feed the compost pile between online school sessions. They’ve had two subsequent mini-harvests and are well underway to produce what aficionados have coined the “California coffee experience” — an organic coffee style gaining traction globally. . . .
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'HOW CANNABIS TECH CAN HELP BUILD A BETTER CUP OF COFFEE'
WIRED.COM - MARCH 27, 2018
Story By: Matt Simon
Photo By: Par Bengtsson /FrinJ Coffee
IN THE HILLS near Santa Barbara, something funky is growing. No, it’s not the newest strain of bubba kush. It’s coffee, sprouting farther north than it should be. Coffee belongs in the tropics—it doesn't like cold snaps. But here at Frinj Coffee, a special variety called geisha flourishes.
And it’s about to get a whole lot more special—thanks, actually, to cannabis. Front Range Biosciences, which produces marijuana plants free of viruses and bacteria, is branching out into other crops like coffee, today announcing it would provide Frinj more than 3 million plants (technically known as “rooted cuttings”) over the next four years. Using this “clean stock” technology, Southern California could soon be green with coffee engineered in the lab to be healthy and productive. It’s just another odd way the booming cannabis industry is having downstream effects on other crops—starting with coffee, and possibly following up with crops like bananas and sugar and hops.
Growing cannabis isn’t a particularly drawn-out process. After perhaps half a year, you harvest the whole plant and you’re done with it. But during its short life, cannabis can fall victim to nasties like fungi and viruses. This is especially precarious if you clone your crop—that is, identify a particularly productive or potent plant, take tissue samples, and grow them into their own plants. Clone a seemingly healthy yet afflicted plant and you’ll end up with a worthless greenhouse.
That's why, in August 2016, Front Range Biosciences began developing a method of tissue culturing that avoided all these problems. When it takes samples of cannabis, it makes sure the stuff is free of bacteria and viruses, growing the little plants in their own containers, feeding them the right nutrients and amount of light.
“You can control certain processes through hormones, like rooting or shooting or elongation,” says Jon Vaught, CEO of Front Range. “It's really like a manufacturing process for plants. You don't have to deal with pests, so you don't have to use pesticides. You control your environment.” The client then takes these wunder-plants and raises them in a greenhouse, where they grow with a good head start.
The same process, it turns out, can work on coffee. Though Frinj isn’t worried about local Southern California maladies affecting its plants. “We're at an advantage here in California in that we have no traditional diseases that the coffee regions have,” says Jay Ruskey, CEO of Frinj. “It's our responsibility to get plant material that has no diseases and keep it that way. The clean stock program will help us ensure that.”
What Frinj is really concerned about, though, is the precious genetics of its California-loving plants. Namely, it wants to know what it’s planting. Traditionally with coffee, you take seeds from a plant you liked for its growth or production or the tastiness of its beans, then spread those seeds. But that’s not exactly exact. “You get a certain tree of a certain variety, but there's a 5 to 15 percent chance that there was some wind pollination from other trees, or some cross pollination, and so that seed stock has this ability to begin to naturally hybridize,” Ruskey says.
With plants in the lab, though, Front Range can culture the tissue over and over and over, churning out genetic copies. (A coffee plant produces around 1,500 seeds, but those seeds don’t keep very well.) Front Range is working with several varieties of Frinj’s coffee, and can thus begin to build a database of the choicest coffee plants for future use. That means its geisha varietal, which grows so well in this less-than-tropical climate, won't get bastardized by accidental cross-pollination.
Now, this does introduce some potential problems. Genetic diversity is generally good; the coffee trees in a traditional plantation aren’t all identical, so while some may fall victim to a certain disease, others may have the lucky genetics that makes them immune. These survive, and the crop doesn’t entirely fail. But when you lose genetic diversity, you run the risk of losing a whole bunch of plants.
“That's the tradeoff you get,” says Vaught. “There is some risk associated with just having lots of the same one, but at the same time it's worth it. We can keep tens, hundreds, thousands of unique varieties safe and sound, so that if you did have something that got wiped out, you could go back and deploy it.” It’s like a seed vault—only instead of seeds, it’s preserving tissue.
Beyond coffee, hypothetically labs like Front Range can build databases of other crops like berries and pineapples.
With the continued march of cannabis legalization across the US, expect a downpour of money to supercharge the cultivation of the crop. And advances here will in turn help advance agriculture as a whole. “The emergence of a new high value crop like cannabis opens opportunities for innovation and improvement,” says Vaught.
Yet another reason to end the prohibition on cannabis. Do it for the people, if not the plants.
'YOUR COFFEE IS FROM WHERE? CALIFORNIA?'
NEW YORK TIMES - MAY 26, 2017
Story By STEPHANIE STROM
Photo By Morgan Maassen
GOLETA, Calif. — There is a new crop growing in Southern California’s famous avocado groves — coffee.
About two dozen farms between San Diego and here, just outside Santa Barbara, are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in what may be the first serious effort in the United States to commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.
“When people hear I’m growing coffee, they typically make a face and say something like, ‘Well, how good can coffee grown in California be?’” said Jay Ruskey, the owner of Good Land Organics, who is widely regarded as the father of the state’s nascent coffee business.
The farmers are hoping to capitalize on a variety of changing factors abroad and here, including the aging of California’s avocado trees, which are producing less fruit.
The avocado growers face major disruptions in their business, including increased competition from Mexican imports, less access to water and rising real estate prices, all of which are forcing them to rethink that crop. But thanks to Mr. Ruskey, they have realized that their sprawling avocado trees provide perfect shade for high-quality coffee bushes.
One variety of Mr. Ruskey’s beans, Pacamara, emits an earthy scent like the smell of California dirt and new plants in spring. His Geisha beans have a light and fruity flavor with low acidity. Bourbon finishes with a chocolate taste.
As growers like him consider the move into growing coffee beans, they are eyeing machinery that can harvest the beans, which would reduce labor costs, as well as a contraption called a demucilager that mechanically strips coffee berry skin and pulp off the beans, rather than using water to clean them.
And they see more and more American consumers willing to spend $8 or $12 for a cup of joe, which would offset their high costs of production.
At the same time, climate change threatens to damage the coffee crop in the tropical highlands that produce nearly all the world’s beans, potentially opening up a lucrative opportunity in the $20 billion export market for beans. Last year, some small Brazilian coffee farmers lost 90 percent of their crop to drought and heat, and similar conditions in Sumatra in western Indonesia made it uneconomical for many farmers there to harvest what little crop they had.
Mr. Ruskey has grown coffee on his farm for more than a decade, but it is only over the last three or four years, as his coffee started winning high scores in taste tests, that other farmers have begun to try their hands at growing it. Still, Doug Welsh, roastmaster at Peet’s, notes that the number of coffee bushes growing in California today is 30 times what it was 13 years ago when Mr. Ruskey started, or about 14,000 plants.
“We probably roast more coffee at Peet’s in one day than is being produced on all the farms growing coffee here, but I’m looking at this as a cup half full,” Mr. Welsh said. “It’s early days, but I think it could at least get to be as big as the Hawaiian coffee business.”
(There are roughly 800 coffee farms in the Hawaiian Islands producing as much as nine million pounds of unroasted beans a year; California produces only hundreds of pounds. Globally, 12 billion pounds of coffee are consumed each year.)
These growers aim to appeal to the premium coffee market. More than half the adult coffee drinkers in America reported drinking a specialty coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association, or roughly twice as many as in 2010.
“People are shifting away from the way my grandparents drank coffee, which was at breakfast and made from whatever coffee was on sale — it was simply fuel,” said Peter Giuliano, chief research officer at the Specialty Coffee Association. “They’re willing to pay for something unusual.”
A pound of dried green specialty coffee beans can sell for as much as $120 in today’s market, according to Andy Mullins, a retired technology executive who has planted coffee on his property east of Santa Barbara. “You should be able to produce a pound for under $30, which is a superb profit margin,” Mr. Mullins said. “The only places that see better margins than that are software companies.”
Mr. Mullins is not a coffee drinker, but he caught the bug after visiting Mr. Ruskey’s farm, which cascades down a mountainside some 650 feet above the Pacific Ocean. Dragon fruit trees and finger lime bushes are interspersed among cherimoya and avocado trees, and each fruit crop is enlisted to help others grow. The avocado trees are the workhorses, acting as trellises for passion fruit vines and providing shade for the coffee bushes.
His profits from growing those unusual crops has helped persuade other farmers to take on the risk and expense of growing coffee. It can take as many as four years for coffee plants to get established, said Mark Gaskell, a farm adviser in the University of California system, meaning a grower must make a significant upfront investment before seeing any return.
In addition, coffee is labor-intensive. Many of the coffee growers here are looking to Brazil, where coffee harvesting machines have replaced the people who picked and processed coffee, for ideas about how to reduce labor costs.
“The way they do it there would remind you of how cotton or almonds are harvested, highly mechanized and technical,” Mr. Welsh said, though he noted that such machinery tends to operate on large, flat spaces that are very different from coastal California’s mountainous terrain.
Many California avocado groves are aging, confronting their owners with a variety of challenges — and coffee offers one sort of transition.
Avocado trees were popular because they are easy to grow, requiring water, a little fertilizer and almost no maintenance. But water is now a more expensive resource, and because avocado trees are traditionally not pruned, older trees have dense foliage that discourages fruiting.
That was the problem Mr. Mullins faced when he retired to a home in the Santa Barbara area. “The home we purchased came with four acres of avocado trees, and we thought, Hey, that could be an interesting thing to get involved with,” he said.
But he soon discovered that his avocado trees were 30 years old and not so productive. His options were to cut them back severely to regenerate growth, replace them or prune them, each of which would require significant expense and put the grove out of production for at least two years.
So Mr. Mullins began looking into what’s known as high-density planting, and that led him to Mr. Ruskey, who is widely known among such growers. Good Land Organics looks more like a jungle than the cherimoya grove it was when Mr. Ruskey’s family bought the property 27 years ago.
He has planted cactuses that produce dragon fruit and avocado trees among the cherimoyas, and everything is knitted together with passion fruit vines. Their mingled roots help preserve soil, and their foliage creates a shade that helps conserve water while providing just the right amount of dappled sunshine for coffee bushes.
So after spending some time at Good Land, Mr. Mullins and his wife, Linda, planted coffee in their avocado grove. They are growing Geisha, a Panamanian varietal that produces some of the world’s most expensive coffee beans, and Caturra, a Colombian coffee that is the workhorse of the specialty coffee business.
Willem Boot, a consultant to the coffee industry, said that in many ways, the climate along California’s southern coast was ideal for coffee. “You have colder nights and warmer days pretty consistently, and the temperature rarely gets close to freezing,” Mr. Boot said.
Such weather patterns allow coffee berries to mature slowly, which is the key to producing high-quality coffee. “Some of Jay’s coffees are truly excellent and can succeed in the specialty market,” he said. The farm’s Typica, a centuries-old Arabica variety, “is really great.”
In 2015, Mr. Ruskey took some of his exotic fruits and coffee berries to Re:co, the coffee industry equivalent of TED conferences. “It put coffee in the context of fruit,” Mr. Giuliano said. “Very few people in the world get to taste a coffee berry,” he said, but when they do, it’s easy to understand what makes the seeds inside, which become coffee beans, special.
A year earlier, Coffee Review, a consumer publication, had given Good Land’s Caturra coffee a score of 91 out of 100, and depending on the roast, brew and time of harvest, the farm’s coffees have scored from the mid-80s to the low 90s on other quality tests.
“There’s no question that Jay has proved good coffee can be grown in California,” Mr. Giuliano said.
Jason Mraz, a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter known for his hit “The Remedy,” expects to produce his first significant coffee crop in about two years. “I started my career in a coffee house, and I love the coffee culture,” Mr. Mraz said. “I knew right away that California coffee could be special.”
So two years ago, he and his farm crew planted some 2,500 coffee bushes among the avocado groves on the 1,700 acres he farms near San Diego. Each plant’s roots had to be caged to protect them from gophers. The bushes were caged above ground, too, and then wrapped to insulate and protect their leaves — just planting them took three months.
Today, Mr. Mraz said, the bushes are waist high and producing a few coffee berries. Only a handful were lost, mostly to gophers, coyotes and wind.
He gets a variety of reactions when he tells people about his coffee venture, he said.
“In the 1960s, people didn’t think you could grow wine grapes in California, either,” Mr. Mraz said. “I like to let the coffee deniers I meet here know that not only is coffee growing well in California, it also has its own flavor profile — and right now, it’s one of the rarest coffees in the world.”
'THE RACE TO SAVE COFFEE'
WASHINGTON POST - OCT. 19, 2017
Story by Caitlin Dewey
CENTROAMERICANO, a new variety of coffee plant, hasn’t sparked the buzz of, say, Starbucks’s latest novelty latte. But it may be the coolest thing in brewing: a tree that can withstand the effects of climate change.
Climate change could spell disaster for coffee, a crop that requires specific temperatures to flourish and that is highly sensitive to a range of pests. So scientists are racing to develop more tenacious strains of one of the world’s most beloved beverages.
In addition to Centroamericano, seven other new hybrid varieties are gradually trickling onto the market. And this summer, World Coffee Research — an industry-funded nonprofit group — kicked off field tests of 46 new varieties that it says will change coffee-growing as the world knows it.
“Coffee is not ready to adapt to climate change without help,” said Doug Welsh, the vice president and roastmaster of Peet’s Coffee, which has invested in WCR’s research.
Climate scientists say few coffee-growing regions will be spared the effects of climate change. Most of the world’s crop is cultivated around the equator, with the bulk coming from Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Rising temperatures are expected to shrink the available growing land in many of these countries, said Christian Bunn, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture who has analyzed the shift in coffee regions. Warmer air essentially “chases” coffee up to cooler, higher altitudes — which are scarce in Brazil and Zimbabwe, among other coffee-growing countries.
Temperature is not climate change’s only projected impact in coffee-growing regions. Portions of Central America are expected to see greater rainfall and shorter dry seasons, which are needed to harvest and dry beans. In Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, rainfall is projected to decrease, potentially sparking dry periods.
These sorts of changes will pose problems for many crops. But coffee is particularly vulnerable, scientists say, because it has an unusually shallow gene pool. Only two species of coffee, arabica and robusta, are currently grown for human consumption. And farmers traditionally haven’t selected for diversity when breeding either plant — instead, essentially, they’ve been marrying generations of coffee with its close cousins.
As a result, there are precious few varieties of arabica that can grow in warmer or wetter conditions. In addition, diseases and pests that might be exacerbated under climate change could knock out entire fields of plants.
A disease of particular concern — coffee leaf rust, or “la roya” in Spanish — devastated coffee plantations across Central America in 2011. It effectively halved El Salvador’s coffee output and cost the region an estimated 1.7 million jobs.
Coffee farmers could see their livelihoods threatened, noted Aaron Davis, a British coffee researcher, because coffee trees are perennials with a 20- to 30-year life span: If a field is damaged by a bad season, farmers aren’t necessarily in a position to immediately replant it. And because coffee takes three years to mature, farmers face several years without income after new trees are planted.
“Under all these scenarios, farmers pay the biggest price,” Davis added.
While few experts expect these factors to drive coffee to extinction, they could severely reduce the global supply — and increase the hardship for coffee farmers.
“The major concern of the industry is that the quantity, and even the future, of good coffee is threatened by climate change,” said Benoit Bertrand, an agronomist with the French agricultural research group CIRAD and one of the world’s most respected coffee breeders. “So the question becomes: How can we address this with new technology and new innovations?”
COFFEE IS NOT READY TO ADAPT TO CLIMATE CHANGE WITHOUT HELP.
Doug Walsh, the roastmaster of Peet’s Coffee
Despite coffee’s global popularity, few growers have risen to the challenge. There has historically been no real market for improved coffee plants, Bertrand and Davis said: Unlike such major commodity crops as corn or soybeans, coffee is grown primarily by small farmers with low margins who can’t shell out for the latest seed or growing system.
As a result, coffee is coming late to the intensive breeding programs that have revolutionized other crops. But in the past 10 years, interest around plant improvement has exploded, driven in part by the growth of the specialty coffee market.
Plant breeders have begun cataloguing the hundreds of strains of arabica in existence and cultivating them in different growing areas. They’ve also begun to experiment with robusta, which grows in higher temperatures and fares better against diseases but often tastes bitter. There is some hope that new varieties of robusta, or robusta/arabica crosses, could capture that resilience without the bad flavor.
Lately, there has been a particular surge of interest in a type of plant called an F1 hybrid, which crossbreeds two different strains of arabica to produce a unique “child” plant. They can be made from any of the hundreds of varieties of arabica and bred for qualities such as taste, disease resistance and drought tolerance.
Because they are the first generation, F1 hybrids also demonstrate something scientists call “hybrid vigor” — they produce unusually high yields, like a sort of super plant.
Since 2010, eight such F1 hybrids have been released to the commercial market. Bertrand is currently testing a class of an additional 60 crosses with the support of World Coffee Research.
The researchers say that the top two or three — which are expected to become available to farmers as soon as 2022 — will offer good taste, high yields and resilience to a range of coffee’s current and future woes, from higher temperatures to nematodes.
“These hybrids deliver a combination of traits that were never before possible in coffee,” said Hanna Neuschwander, the communications director at World Coffee Research. “It’s the traits that farmers need with the traits that markets demand. People used to think the two were mutually exclusive.”
But the hybrids’ success remains largely untested at scale. Of the eight F1 hybrids on the market at present, only one — Centroamericano — has been planted in any significant volume, Neuschwander said. The variety is currently growing on an estimated 2,500 acres in Central America; for context, the U.S. Agriculture Department reports that Honduras alone grows coffee on more than 800,000 acres.
CLIMATE CHANGE WILL POSE PROBLEMS FOR MOST CROPS. BUT COFFEE IS PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE, SCIENTISTS SAY, BECAUSE IT HAS AN UNUSUALLY SHALLOW GENE POOL.
Farmers who have planted the new trees are seeing success. Starbucks has sold coffee made from F1 hybrids as part of its small-lot premium brand. Last spring, a batch of Centroamericano grown on a Nicaraguan family farm scored 90 out of 100 points in that country’s prestigious tasting competition, which some in the industry heralded as a major victory.
But the path to adoption will be steep. Breeders have developed these plants, Neuschwander said, but many areas of the world don’t have the seed industries and infrastructure in place to actually distribute them. That’s particularly true in the case of F1 hybrids, which — thanks to their particular genetics — can only be grown from tissue samples.
F1 hybrids are also expensive — as much as 21/2 times the cost of conventional plants. That puts them well outside the range of most smallholder farmers, said Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist and technical adviser with Catholic Relief Services’ Latin America division.
Kraft, who has worked with World Coffee Research to test F1 hybrids in Nicaragua, said that in his region, at least, only midsize and large plantations have switched to them.
“I think our position is that we need to really understand the requirements for all farmers to be able to use these new technologies,” Kraft said. “My concern is that small farmers don’t have access to the capital to pay for these investments.”
Even if they did, however, some experts caution that the new coffee varieties are only a piece of a much larger adaptation process. To cope with the effects of climate change, farmers may need to adopt other agricultural practices, such as shade-farming, cover-cropping and terracing, said Bunn, the researcher.
In some regions, those practices won’t be economical. And in that case, policymakers should focus on helping farmers transition to other crops or other livelihoods altogether, researchers stress.
“People sell [F1 hybrids] as a silver bullet,” Bunn said. “To be clear, those plants are indispensable, and I don’t question the value of the work . . . but we need more to adapt to climate change. And we need to accept the hard reality that some places will need to move out of coffee production.”
'NINETY PLUS COFFEE ATTRACTS HIGHEST BID EVER AT A GESHA AUCTION: $5001.50/KG'
Story By TESSPRESSO COFFEE
Albert Einstein once wrote- “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”. Marwin Shaw’s (of Monk Bodhi Dharma / Disciple Roasters) unwavering commitment to quality and goodness, has seen him cultivate both success and respect.
His ongoing relationship with producers like Ninety Plus Coffee is but one avenue he harnesses such quality from. These producers of some of the world’s most extraordinary coffee last month attracted the highest bid ever at a Gesha Auction. Rather than focusing on the $5,000 per kilo price tag Lot 227 attained, Marwin prefers to emphasis the fact that this calibre of coffee differentiates a Gesha that scores 97/100, from commodity coffee. Thus showing a point of difference in the market. There are leaders in the industry who are willing to push the boundaries. By striving to become a better version of themselves, they inspire others to improve themselves too. ‘Game changer’ may be a notion thrown around easily these days, but Lot 227 is certainly one of the most extraordinary coffees Ninety Plus has ever produced. It’s no surprise Chad Wang won the 2017 World Brewers Cup Championship with it. More importantly, it’s created a shift in coffee farming, and placed Ninety Plus firmly at the forefront of innovation.
I was fortunate enough to sample Lot 227, and the complex flavours in my cup were like nothing I have ever tasted before. Full credit must go to José Alfredo, General Manager of the Ninety Plus Gesha Estates in Panama, who carefully worked on his unique fermentation style. These producers don’t just talk the talk- their commitment to leaving coffee better than they found it; is backed up by their genuine care for community. Farmers are remunerated exceptionally well, and the health of the ecosystem is an imperative.
Now- back to what I was tasting- ‘complex’ would not suffice as a descriptor. It doesn’t taste like coffee as you know it to be. What the palate experiences is multidimensional. White peach, lilac, cola, cocoa nibs, and even umami…. flavours I never knew I could unearth from the humble brown bean.
Ninety Plus aren’t just transforming the coffee farming model, they have managed to alter my understanding of what coffee is.