Category: Agriculture

Next steps

An intriguing piece from a few weeks back by Nicole LaPorte on Kenneth Lander’s THRIVE Farmers Coffee. THRIVE seeks to move beyond the fair trade co-op model, to capture more of the value added by the coffee supply chain (roasters, distributors) for the farmer who got the beans out of the ground in the first place. THRIVE farmers follow organic methods, although not all go through the process of USDA certification.

It’s a small operation now; it will be interesting to see whether it can scale up from its current annual volume, somewhat more than 300,000 pounds of coffee.

Some links: 62/a

Two recent articles pertaining to food labeling: First, Gustave Axelson recaps the labels vying for your attention as you shop for bird-friendly coffee.

…coffee sellers don’t always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. “Probably about only 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package,” said Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms. But they don’t see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small—and silent—minority: birders.

Next, Mark Bittman proposes labels for packaged food that put the information you need right up front. A caption to the print version of the story recommends scanning the standardized list of ingredients in today’s packaging, not necessarily reading it in full:

…if the list of ingredients spans an entire paragraph, chances are you don’t need it.

I like Bittman’s red-yellow-green color codes, and I like the prominence of the Welfare measure. It would be nice to give more visibility to ingredients to which various consumers are allergic or intolerant.

Stopper

Hugh Powell reminds us of the connection between wine bottle closures and the preservation of biodiversity. Cork prices are crashing, which threatens cork oak plantations on the Iberian peninsula.

Cork trees live for about 250 years, growing in open groves interspersed with meadows of tawny grasses and diverse wildflowers. Once a decade, skilled workers with hatchets carefully slice off an inch-thick jacket of bark, leaving the tree to grow it back. There are cork farmers right now slicing cork from the same trees that their great, great, great grandparents harvested. In all, some 13 billion corks are produced each year, slightly more than half of them in Portugal and the rest in Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It’s a $2 billion industry.

The skilled labor pays well, and the farmers can also keep livestock on the land. While they’re at it, the farmers keep a delicate balance in their forests, avoiding overgrazing but keeping shrubs from taking over, setting controlled fires and putting out fierce ones.

Among conservationists there’s a real fear that as cork prices fall, the cork oak forests will deteriorate or be converted into eucalyptus plantations or Mediterranean resorts.

Not just for coffee farms

Paul Stapleton introduces “evergreen agriculture.” In Africa, intercropping with trees of the genera Sesbania, Gliricidia, Tephrosia, and others improves yields and provides other benefits; dropped leaves from the trees provide natural fertilizer.

The indigenous African acacia (Faidherbia albida) is perhaps the most remarkable of these fertiliser trees. Faidherbia sheds its nitrogen-rich leaves during the early rainy season and remains dormant throughout the crop-growing period. The leaves grow again when the dry season begins. This makes it highly compatible with food crops, because it does not compete with them for light, nutrients or water during the growing season: only its bare branches spread overhead while the food crops grow to maturity.

Bank on it

Catherine A. Lindell, Ryan S. O’Connor, and Emily B. Cohen make a contribution to what we know about songbirds’ nesting success in active and abandoned coffee plantations and active pasture. Specifically, they studied White-throated Thrushes (Turdus assimlis) and Clay-colored Thrushes (T. grayi) in Las Alturas reserve (for four breeding seasons) and Rio Negro, an active coffee farm (unfortunately, only for one season).

These two species of birds, congeners of our American Robin, do not migrate north to the U.S. to breed (there are some records in south Texas for Clay-colored Thrush), in contrast to the charismatic migratory wood warblers (used to promote shade-grown coffee) that feed in forests and plantation overstories in the winter months. The thrushes of the research prefer to nest on the ground or low in a tree. The slightly surprising results of the paper are that nesting success is only indirectly affected by type of land cover, and the effect is through how well the terrain provides concealment from predators. In particular, nesting in a steep bank in pastureland provides the greatest protection (the nest can’t be detected from below, and cattle can’t trample it).

There is a scintilla of a hint that the birds can be more successful in an active coffee plantation—more humans means fewer predators—but keep in mind that only one year of data is available.

I’ll let the authors summarize the research’s conservation implications:

Conservation recommendations based on land-cover type would be relatively easy if we could rank land-covers as to the quality of habitat they provide for target species and if rankings were consistent across species. Our results indicate these conditions are not met for these species.

More cork

Audubon Naturalist Society eNews reports:

As we gather with families and friends over the next few weeks to celebrate holidays and other special occasions, chances are there will be bottles to open. And when you open that champagne, wine, or cider why not save the cork for recycling? All natural corks can be dropped off at any of three Cork & Fork stores — in Bethesda, MD; Gainesville, VA; or downtown Washington — or at any Whole Foods Market. The Cork & Fork stores have partnered with ReCORK, and Whole Foods is working with Cork ReHarvest. The effort aims to help sustain cork forests and turn used cork into useful products, such as shoes, flooring tiles, building insulation, and sports equipment. So, cheers and recycle on!

Drop by drop

Good special report from The Economist on the state of the world’s fresh water demand and supply. Not surprisingly, the report stresses the point that water is woefully underpriced:

[Chris] Perry, the irrigation economist, says water is typically priced at 10-50% of the costs of operating and maintaining the system, and that in turn is only 10-50% of what water is worth in terms of agricultural productivity. So to bring supply and demand into equilibrium the price would have to rise by 4-100 times.

Unfortunately, water access and pricing is a hot, hot political issue; the report concludes that a mixture of regulation, property rights, pricing, and small-community management (a farmers’ co-op in India’s Andhra Pradesh state is visited) may be the only way to go. One thinks of the acequias of the American Southwest as described by Stanley Crawford in The River in Winter and Mayordomo.

Shade-grown coffee: state of play

The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to two reports: first, a recent summary by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center on the supply of and market for the SMBC’s branded Bird Friendly® Coffee. It’s interesting that nearly 40% comes from Peru; Mexico and Guatemala are other major producers. On the demand side, nearly 350,000 pounds were consumed in 2008 (the last period for which full-year figures are available), divided almost evenly between Japan and the United States.

Amid the clutter of labelling and badging at the turn of the decade, the SMBC established criteria for coffee agriculture specifically designed to protect bird life, and chose to protect them with a mark. These criteria go beyond relatively simple organic certification. Rice’s precis:

… the coffee is:

  • Certified organic
  • Certified shade-grown (according to SMBC criteria developed in 1997 and based on scientific fieldwork)

Criteria include: a minimum canopy height of 12 meters; a species list of at least 10 trees in addition to the major or “backbone” species; at least 40% foliage density; and three strata or layers of vegetation that provide structural diversity. Criteria apply to the coffee production area itself, and industry and certification specialists consider them to be the strictest shade standards in the world.

Rice states that growers see a 5 to 10 cent per pound premium for meeting BFC standards, in addition to any price bump for being organic.

Unfortunately, as Ezra Fieser reports, that price differential has narrowed over the past few years from a 30-40% markon mid-decade to about 20% now. This trend is driving farmers back to conventional agricultural methods. According to the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education, costs to the organic grower run 15% higher (certification fees, losses to pests), while yields are 40% lower. As my old B school teacher liked to say, “Sell below cost, and in the long run, you’re out of business.”