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.

So, here is the skinny on the offset: An organization, Trees for the Future, plants trees at about 10 for $1 in various locations around the world. A consulting group had determined that $7 would buy enough trees to offset the average travel distance for people to get to the conference site. So, give $7 to the conference and they in turn donate the money to plant 70 trees. Subsequently, the carbon burnt through the combustion of jet fuel will become absorbed into leaves and woody matter of the trees over the life of those trees. There was some unknown as to whether any of the foam core signage, preparatory travel, climate control at the conference center, etc was also included in these 70 trees.

Many people at last year’s conference were confused about the $7 mandatory offset, many others accepted it without a blink. The link with Trees for the Future was not widely publisized, nor the quantity of carbon that each person generated in traveling to the conference. With some different communication efforts, complaints may be alleviated.

Still, there is question in the scientific community as to the carbon-offsetting impact that planting trees has, namely whether it truly sequesters carbon back into the soil by converting the carbon into the appropriate ion. We at the Roastery are looking at terrestrial carbon sequestration and partnering with Holistic Management International for us to become “carbon neutral”. There is still some science to be uncovered with the use of herding animals to sequester carbon into the soil, and how much is sequestered at what rate. However, the decision-making framework, which we incorporate into our business, and the worldwide results of emulating herding behavior through sound management is more appealing to us as a business than other offset mechanisms.

One thing was clear in my first meeting with this volunteer group of coffee industry professionals on the Sustainability Committee – they are passionate about steering the coffee industry to significantly contributing to the United Nations Millenium Development Goals. I think we will take some great strides pushing this bohemouth along, and am encouraged with the Committee’s fervency. At least for now, I am happy to give $7 for planting trees wherever that may be.

I start thinking about the expansion and the market share of these companies. Green Mountain is in 5000 supermarkets. Tully’s currently has 500 retail stores. Let’s say one of those retail stores sells 100 pounds of coffee in a week – that comes to over 2.5 million pounds of coffee in a year just for the retail stores. Now, I’m making the number 100 up, assuming it’s a moderately busy place. I have no idea how many pounds a grocer sells in a week. Just 50 adds 13 million more pounds. Then, there are the retail stores that are Green Mountain. That’s 15-20 million pounds of coffee  -from just as many coffee trees- traveling around the country and overseas, green beans arriving on boat on the coasts, being roasted, then shipped on FedEx and UPS to the various places. I’ll need to research some of the carbon footprint associated.

The distribution arm of this company must be enormous, as must be the marketing budgets. I start to stagger at the implications, and at the potential markets share that can be acquired by small roasters like us, the Buena Vista Roastery. Annually, we roast beans that come from 30,000 coffee trees from various nations, mostly organic, what we can find as Fair Trade, and the rest conventionally grown. The five of us take care of servicing equipment, marketing, point of sale items, customer service, roasting, bagging, product quality, etc. We are stuffed into a space much too small for our expanding market, and have been using the same Diedrich roaster for more than 14 years. It works like a charm. We also visit and revisit our holisticgoal, address concerns and potential new clients as a company and work to monitor our progress to live according to our beliefs. Knowing how much work it takes to represent who we are at our core to our community, I wonder how the 800 pound gorilla can do it.

In our market research, we see people evermore supporting local and small companies that are socially conscious and community aware. The Bongo Billy’s Salida Cafe has already been on the forefront of this thinking and will soon be serving only 100% Organic and fair trade, shade grown, rainforest alliance espresso. It’s local, independently owned and operated, and very community minded. The carbon footprint for getting the beans where they need to go is about as small as you can get for the industry.

Anyway, jus tsome pontificating this morning as I read about yet another business struggling to stay afloat in our current economic situation. And that company being consumed by the larger fish. It certainly brings up a lot of questions, and many more curiosities that give me pause. There’s a little Darwinism going on an a corporate level, with niches open for us – the Galapagos finches – and global catastrophe hitting the farther-reaching businesses those that are more affected by density independent factors, such as a flailing economy. My two cents this morning…

6% of the compounds in a roasted bean are acids. We find citric acid, acetic acid and malic acid as the most important acids that affect flavor (sourness), and we also have quinic, formic, phosphoric, chlorogenic and other acids, which do not affect the acid taste as much, but do contribute. By acid taste, I mean the tingle on your tongue, especially present when you drink a lighter roast. The darker roasts tend to remove the acid taste and have more body, or weight on the top and sides of your tongue.

The acid taste, however, is not necessarily the same acid that may affect your stomach. Some people have found that the malic acid present would be the culprit. Others suppose that it is actually some combination of particular acids that are interacting with the chemistry going on in individual stomachs. In our beans, we have citric and acetic as the main contributors to taste, with malic and phosphoric only at half the threshhold levels.

When I say, ‘our beans’, I mean Arabica and not Robusta. The Arabica beans actually have less acids present as a green bean than the green Robusta. Once roasted, however, the proportion of free acids available changes and Arabica will tend to have more than Robusta. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to why Arabica taste so much better than Robusta, on the whole.

People declare, ‘this coffee is stomach-safe’. Often the Indonesian coffees have been given this status, primarily because they tend to be naturally processed as opposed to wet processed. The dry process (natural) will subdue some of the acid. Some people also think that the more oily the bean, the higher the acid (the ones that affect the stomach). We know that the citric and acetic are less present with an oilier bean – oils develop at darker roasting temperatures.

There’s a lot of possibility presented here, and we haven’t even touched on organic versus conventional poetntial. Basically, there’s no succinct answer to, ‘can I have a low-acid coffee’, especially without knowing if they mean taste or effect. The easiest thing would be to turn people on to the darker roasts and the Indonesians, like a Sumatran on Papua New Guinea. Still, there may be some level of malic acid present that would cause gastric concern. There may also be something in the person’s own chemistry that disagrees with certain coffee. The acidic taste would be replaced with the higher body.

That’s all for Part I. I’ll write more about the chemistry of coffee in the future.

The Sustainability Committee has tasked itself to meet the United Nations Millenium Development Goals (MDG). This is a wonderful aim. People have already been working on these goals and perhaps there are ways to help effect policy to encourage more progress. This fits in with the Roastery’s work with BBI International and becoming a certified Green Business. We still would like to work on a carbon footprint assessment and subsequent ways to reduce that footprint.