Legend has it that coffee was first discovered by Kaldi, a goat herder grazing his flock on wooded Ethiopian hillside. Noticing that the goats munching on certain bushes seemed more animated than usual, he investigated, found some berry-laden bushes beneath the trees, sampled, and shared the buzz.
He took some of the berries to a local monastery, where, after initial hesitation, the monks found that by roasting the berry seeds and brewing them into a beverage, they had the answer to their difficulty in staying wake during midnight prayer vigils. And coffee was born.
Today coffee is cultivated in over eighty different countries and, after petroleum, is the world’s second largest legal commodity.
Whatever the other merits of the legend, it did get one thing right: coffee, in its natural habitat, is a shade-growing plant. It does not tolerate direct sunlight, and for over a thousand years coffee farmers were content to raise it beneath the tropical forest canopies, the biodiverse homes to hundreds of bird species.
But as coffee’s popularity grew through the centuries, suppliers needed new ways to increase their production. Botanists came to the rescue in the 1970’s, with the introduction of sun-tolerant coffee plants which offered double to triple the yield of the shade-grown varieties. Requiring sun, they also required the removal of the forest canopies which had sheltered and fed so many species of birds for so long.
But the sun-coffee plants had a hidden cost. With the forest went the birds, many of which had fed on the numerous insects which inhabited the undergrowth. And with the forest went the sustaining nitrogen which it fixed in the soil. So farmers had to pay for pesticides, fertilizers, and the labor to apply them.
When the bottom fell out of the worldwide coffee market between 1999 and 2002, many small coffee growers could not afford the pesticides and fertilizers for sun-grown crops.
And with more coffee connoisseurs becoming environmentally conscious, wanting sustainable produced organic beans, growers are gradually migrating back to shade-growing coffee techniques.
The birds of the tropical canopies will, hopefully, be migrating to join them.
