Learn About Shade-Grown Coffee

What is Shade Grown Coffee? Shade Grown Coffee is high altitude Arabica coffee that is grown under the canopy of larger plants and trees. The coffee bush is a shade loving plant that thrives in this micro-ecosystem and produces slightly larger, more flavorful beans than sun grown coffee. Sun grown coffee has really only been around since the mid 1970’s and it has proven to be an unsustainable micro-ecosystem that requires constant fertilization and the consistent use of pesticides. This is very good for the producers of fertilizers and pesticides but very bad for the farmers and the environment. Sun grown coffee is a hybrid plant that was “invented” in a misguided attempt to make coffee farming easier and more like let’s say, wheat farming in Kansas. The idea was that if you mow down the rainforest and plant coffee bushes in nice neat rows it would be easier to maintain and easier to harvest. I guess in reality it is easier to walk up to a coffee bush and dump fertilizer on it or walk up to a coffee bush and spray it with pesticides and in fairness it is easier to walk up to a coffee bush and harvest it. But, one has to ask, at what price. Pollution, erosion, flooding, sickness, lower quality products and on and on and on.

At Poverty Bay Coffee Company we set out in 1997 to be a small part of the coffee business doing things in a way that supports the natural environment. We wanted to be a small part of the coffee business doing things in a way that supports the farmers. We wanted to be a small part of the coffee business doing things in a way that supports the birds and the frogs and all of the thousands of species that make the rainforest their home. We wanted to be a small part of the coffee business doing things in a way that gives you, the consumer, a coffee buying option that you can be proud of and tell your friends about.

When we looked at all of our options back in 1997 we really thought the most important issue in coffee was organic. It is an important issue. But the more research that we did the more clear it was to us that by far the most important issue in coffee was whether or not it was Shade Grown. If it is Shade Grown it is almost certainly organic naturally. The micro-ecosystem of a Rainforest gives the coffee bush everything that it needs to survive and to thrive. The soil is fertile. The natural enemies of the coffee bush are kept in check by their natural enemies. It is nature in balance with itself. The farmers are able to harvest many sustenance crops from the rainforest as well. It is man working in harmony with nature not man trying to bend nature to his will, damn the consequences. It is growing coffee in the rainforest not growing coffee instead of the rainforest.