Why shade grown coffee is better

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Shade-grown coffee needs irrigation less frequently than sun grown coffee. Shade-grown coffee helps decrease deforestation by leaving the trees standing, which can help preserve atmospheric balance due to carbon sequestration. Check out Edit cart. What is Shade-grown Coffee?

Rustic: When this method is used, very little of the native plants are removed. It is the least intrusive method of coffee farming, with minimal management and no use of non-natural pest control.

Traditional polyculture: This method is based on planting coffee crops and other intentionally-planted crops underneath the native shade trees and other fauna. It involves more alteration and removal of the native plants than the rustic method and provides farmers with both coffee beans to sell and additional crops fruit, vegetables, medicinal, etc. Shade-grown coffee is environmentally responsible and is know to taste better, too.

As consumers, we should strive to support businesses that use sustainable farming methods like shade-grown coffee. As the demand for sun-grown coffee decreases, more farmers will likely utilize the more ecologically sound method.

View our selection of responsibly grown Arabica beans, produced on shade-grown coffee plantations. Shop Here. Understanding Shade-Grown and Sun-Grown Coffee Varieties Coffee plants have traditionally grown under a canopy of assorted shade trees. These native pollinators help increase yields of other crops, from coffee to berries. The number of managed honey bee colonies, however, has fallen from 6 million beehives in to 2.

The dense vegetation needed to produce shade-grown coffee helps purify air and filter water, improving the quality of both. The large and numerous trees at shade-grown coffee farms, which are often on mountainsides in hurricane-prone areas, help hold soil together, keeping chunks of farmland from eroding. Landslides caused by more intensive farming can claim lives and ruin infrastructure.

Intensive farming methods exhaust the soil after a couple of decades, which often leads to farmers cutting down forest for new fields. But shade-grown coffee-farming techniques store carbon and replenish soil nutrients, letting the farms thrive for centuries. That disparity caused shade-grown coffee to fall from 43 percent of total cultivated area in to 24 percent in