A Brief History of Coffee Cultivation

The drinking of coffee dates back about 1,000 years with beans grown in Ethiopia and Yemen. The first Coffee houses came into being in the 16th Century in the Middle East. The cultivation of coffee was a monopoly controlled entirely by Arab countries. In the 1600's Dutch spies smuggled out seeds and established coffee cultivation in their colony Java.

Coffee cultivation spread to the New World in the 1700's - introduced by the colonial powers of the day to their respective colonies as a high value cash crop. Today, coffee is the second most valuable traded commodity after oil. Canadians drink and average of 402 cups of coffee per year and spend a total of more than $3 billion on coffee every year!

The Coffee tree is a small, evergreen tree that grows best in the shade. Cultivated coffee trees are descended from trees of the genus Coffea, a small tree that grows in the under-story of the tropical forests of Africa. The trees produce a bright red fruit - or cherry, which has two seeds. These seeds are the coffee beans with which we are familiar.

Two species of trees are commonly cultivated today. C. arabica and C. robusta. The high quality beans required for the specialty coffee business are all from the C. arabica trees. Beans from the C. robusta trees are found in the low priced "canned" coffees. The robusta beans are rougher in flavour and higher in caffeine.

Cultivated coffee has traditionally been grown in the shade of other trees. This bio-diverse environment would provide farmers with several crops for harvesting while protecting the planted species from pests an disease that are prevalent in mono-culture agricultural methods. Coffee trees, for example may be grown under the shade of Banana trees and exotic hardwoods. These farms work much like forests, providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds and nitrogen fixing plants. They also provide additional crops and food for the farmers. They are effectively forests and fill the ecological niche of the natural forests they replaced. In El Salvador, for example, traditional coffee plantations account for 60% of that country's remaining forested areas. It is the least disruptive form of agriculture practiced in the world today.

In the past half century, in modern society's relentless march towards high yield mono-culture, capital and chemical intensive farming has lead to the introduction of "sun grown" coffee plantations. In these plantations, high yield trees are planted close together in the sun and mechanized methods can be used to tend the trees and harvest the crop. Sun-grown coffee plantations have caused the destruction of millions of acres of the traditional forest plantations and the introduction to the environment of tons of herbicides and insecticides. The yields are higher per acre but so are the costs of the inputs and the farmers no longer have the alternate sources of income from the companion crops available to them. Worse, the birds, including our Song Birds, have lost valuable habitat.

Sun grown coffee is now the third most pesticide intensive crop per acre (after Tobacco and Cotton) and many pesticides that are banned from use in North America, such as DDT, are still commonly used. Most of the residues from these chemicals are destroyed in the roasting process, but the damage to the farmers and the environment is unmeasured as the Western World seems not to care about the damage caused in producing countries.

In reaction to this alarming trend, Birds and Beans offers only shade grown coffees, and where available, certified Bird Friendly™ coffees.