Shade-grown coffee

Shade-grown coffee is a form of the crop produced from coffee plants grown under a canopy of trees. A canopy of assorted types of shade trees is created to cultivate shade-grown coffee. Because it incorporates principles of natural ecology to promote natural ecological relationships, shade-grown coffee can be considered an offshoot of agricultural permaculture or agroforestry. The resulting coffee can be marketed as "shade-grown". Coffee (especially Coffea arabica) is a small tree or shrub that grows in the forest understory in its wild form, and traditionally was grown commercially under other trees that provided shade. Since the mid-1970s, new sun-tolerant trees and shrubs have been developed in response to fungal disease presence, especially coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), and with the aim to yield higher production rates. As a result of modernization and a push for higher yielding crops, sun-tolerant coffee plants were created to produce larger yields through higher-density, open planting, but the cultivation practices used for them are considered unsustainable and often have a negative impact on the environment. This has resulted in a new trend in support of shade-grown coffee. Although shade-grown coffee is a production system widely regarded as environmentally sustainable, enabling biodiversity conservation, enhancing pest-control services from birds, and contributing to climate change adaptation, there is an important potential tradeoff, namely lower coffee yields. Yet few studies have explicitly examined this tradeoff and the economic incentives required for smallholders to adopt shade practices rather than coffee grown in full sun or little shade. A 2014 study has shown that the proportion of land used to cultivate shade-grown coffee, relative to the total land area used for coffee cultivation, has fallen by nearly 20% since 1996. Recent data have shown that there is a direct correlation between the structural complexity of a coffee plantation and the number of species that can be found there.