We have upgraded our blogging capability. This means that we had to get a new blog address. All of the posts here are on it already, and future posts will be put there. Thank you: www.bvroasteryblog.com.

I recently read a blurb about a University of Michigan study that focuses on how shade grown coffee will help alleviate stress of weather extremes potentially resulting from the changing climate. The results of the study seem rather common sensical once you understand basics of systems thinking. I am not one to question to judgment of funding such a project, because it plays an important role in academia and, as a result, in influencing policy. I will take the opportunity, however, to spout a bit about systems thinking and coffee.

First, what is shade grown coffee? Basically, a coffee plantation is considered shade grown when there exist multiple layers of canopy with the coffee trees. That is, growing coffee as part of the lower canopy, with fruit trees, leguminous trees, etc shading the coffee. There are bird niches in every canopy, greater insect life, animal activity, cycling of nutrients, richer humus, healthier soils, etc. A plantation can go through a certification process to be “Shade Grown”. Most organic coffee production incorporates shade. Shade promotes biodiversity. Biodiversity promotes health.

Within Systems Thinking, there are understood to be three basic systems, hard, soft and natural systems. The hard systems are the ones that humans create and whose outcome is predictable. Their success is determined by the interplay of the parts, and if you remove any of those parts the system will malfunction and stop. Examples include a machine – a cell phone, ipod, this computer. A soft system is also created by humans, but you cannot predict what will happen when the variables are put together or if you remove one of the parts. Examples include an organization, family, business, etc. The third, natural systems, is not made by humans and also have unpredictable relationships. A biodiverse coffee plantation, I argue, is a natural system, even though it is heavily manipulated by humans. I suppose one could argue that a monoculture of coffee may not be natural. In this case, the principles of soft and natural systems are fundamentally the same. The point is, we are dealing with many parts that work together and we cannot predict how they will relate to each other. We cannot predict what will happen when one part is removed. If you reduce the parts intentionally by changing management, such as by reducing canopy, you have less opportunity for self-correction in the plantation. The more biodiverse, the easier it is for the plantation to ‘take care of itself’ and the fewer inputs required.

Common sense reigns. If we manage for maximum production and efficiency in the short term, we would reduce the things that might interfere with harvest – such as pesky tree trunks. We would also heavily mine the soil by producing more fruit (coffee) and replacing the mined minerals with mechanically applied fertilizers. We would also allow for more sunlight to naturally combat fungus that attacks coffee fruit and leaves. By doing so, we acknowledge that we are removing more and more parts to the system – the simpler, the more efficient to work with. This is modern, conventional agriculture, and the baby of the Green Revolution. Counter to hard system functionality, the fewer the parts, the harder it is to self-control. A weather event, such as a ‘drought’ or ‘flood’ comes in and the system has a hard time coping and takes much longer to react and recover, losing productivity and income in the meantime.

Contrarily, a biodiverse plantation can withstand weather events because the abundant variables allow for flexibility in how a plantation can self-regulate. Certainly, human input is essential to maintain a productive coffee plantation that continually removes minerals and carbon in the form of a coffee cherry. Humans also have to discourage an unwanted forest from growing, which undoubtedly would without proper care.

Presumably, researchers at U of M studied the effects of shade grown coffee on the soil, temperature, moisture content, and general micro-climate of a coffee plantation along with the associated plant health. These results would have been compared to plantations that were not shade grown. As a conclusion of the study, we now know emphatically that a canopy is good and would position a coffee farmer better to deal with climate change than if he or she had a monoculture plantation. Now, we as an industry have the science to back up the logic.

The Washington Post has an interesting op-ed this morning, by Vinod Khosla. You might need to be signed up with the Post to read the whole article. In his piece entitled, “All Biofuels Are Not the Same”, he answers a Wall Street Journal critique of his advocacy of subsidies for food-based ethanol. He says,

Cellulosic biofuels offer a chance to have an environmentally meaningful impact on petroleum use while benefiting farmers, entrepreneurs and consumers…biodiesel from food oils such as soybean or palm oil has traditionally created environmental negatives. But corn ethanol has been a stepping stone to cellulosic ethanol, a preferred alternative that is likely to achieve unsubsidized market competitiveness with oil within a few years.

His arguments seem sound from a certain perspective, yet some may question whether they get to the root of the issue and may be rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

For example, if we took every piece of arable land in the United States and converted it to ethanol/biofuel production, we would contribute a whopping 3% of the total demand for gasoline. Not to mention the demand for petroleum by the plastics industry. However, maybe we are giving ourselves time to figure out alternatives. There is also the camp that does not believe we have a problem with peteroleum supply, etc.

This brings me to coffee. The Specialty Coffee Association of America annually awards innovative projects that benefit communities and the environment as a part of its Sustainability Awards. The 2007 winners included a group that developed new paper cup materials that utilize a layer of corn-based ‘plastic’ instead of the traditional layer and a group in Nicaragua that developed a more integrated system on the coffee plantation, producing methane from wastewater, among other things. The 2008 winners have not been posted on-line, but included one group from Europe that is taking coffee pulp from a Brazilian plantation and creating pellet fuel as an alternative to wood.

I applaud the innovation to take a waste product like coffee pulp and convert it into a value-added product that also addresses deforestation and perhaps reduces petroleum demand. I have seen lagoons where the pulp is stored/digested, and note the group in Nicaragua who converts their wastewater to methane. When I served in Costa Rica in the Peace Corps, I worked with some farmers to cap their lagoons of pig manure and funnel the methane produced directly to their kitchen stove. This kind of innovation will help mollify the petroleum crisis, just as ethanol may in the very short term as long as we ignore the environmental and economic effects of conventional corn production. Some are experimenting with this same principle producing biogas for automobiles from bananas and ‘pig poo’.

Once we figure out efficient production of cellulosic biofuel, we may have a good contribution, depending on the agricultural production associated with that biofuel. Yet perhaps we have bigger fish to fry with our national channels of distribution and consumption of goods and services. Fuels and methane made from coffee pulp seem to be a step in the right direction.

I read the following quote yesterday. It comes from a very respectable company that roasts coffee and sells it over the Internet and perhaps through some cafes and restaurants local to them,

Organic farming is the art of holistically utilizing the systems and resources at hand to produce a crop that is the true, natural creation of the land and soil on which it was grown.

And I am compelled to write about its inaccuracy. Today’s organic farming is entirely non-holistic. It is as far from being ‘holistic’ as any conventional farming. By definition these are mutually exclusive elements, as organic/conventional is a fabrication of linear thinking, the other requires the ability to process enormous amounts of information and complexity found in both natural and soft systems.

Let’s first define the terms at play. Organic, Holistic, Conventional. Organic is merely free of synthetics in growing and processing your products, with the soil being free of synthetics for at least three years prior to being deemed ‘organic’ by a third party certifying agency at a cost. Conventional allows the use of synthetics. Holistic includes balancing the complex environmental needs of your situation, with the economic, and your social community and personal values both on and off-farm. By definition there is a disparity between the words organic and holistic. There is actually very little in common when you hold the definitions next to each other. But let’s look at the terms practically.

Take an coffee grower in Colombia. There are three significant situations when he needs to be keenly aware of what is applied to his coffee. First, when young seedlings are transplanted to the field. Grasses and forbs can overrun the seedlings in their quest for sunlight. The common defense is either the herbicide Round-Up to inhibit the growth of chlorophyll, ergo unwanted grass/forbs, and the machete. The machete would be “organic”. Second, to combat fungus. The options available are fungicides or biodiversity and careful observance and selection. Third, to replenish soil since coffee production mines calcium, phosphorous, nitrogen, etc. Usually this would be through synthetic fertilizer or compost.

The farmer has worked with an agency to be Certified Organic, and can sell the green beans at a premium. He has to sell enough to make the cost of certification worthwhile, as well as to pay for added labor needed to clear grass, spread compost, etc. Fortunately, there is also Fair Trade certification, where we in the West are ensured that the farmer is paying decent wages to his employees and they are living under appropriate conditions. And being the sagacious farmer, he also understands that biodiversity will help his cause, growing coffee under a tiered canopy. To help his premium he may pay for Shade Grown and Bird-Friendly Certifications. There are several other certifications available for various activities as well.

Already, we can see that a host of certifications are available through various agencies to augment Organic. If you were doing all the right things, had all the certifications accepted by the consuming West, and were able to balance your financial planning with your family’s needs while monitoring to increase biodiversity and also checking your impact on the community and surrounding environment even off-farm, you are acting more holistic. Organic is but one component – if defining yourself as ‘organic’ fit with your value system; you may find that to survive economically one year, you have to spray Round-Up in a concentrated area, fully aware that you will lose certification on that parcel and need the three years transition back. But you are aware of the consequences and balancing the complexity of the situation.

Conventional and Organic farmers by definition can be holistic. Just the same, Conventional and Organic farming do not equate to holistic. It’s like calling a rectangle a square. These are mutually exclusive, and each actually only analyzes a relatively small component of the whole system, according to a linear thought model. Organic assesses actions and activities. Holistic is a thought process.