Ecological benefits of Shade-grown Coffee
Shade-grown Coffee or Bird Friendly coffee is certified organic and produced on farms with a shade cover that provides important habitat for migratory and resident birds in tropical landscapes, which are increasingly threatened by deforestation globally at an unprecedented rate. The Bird Friendly criteria are the world’s most stringent standards for shade-grown coffee production.
The market for organic, shade-grown coffee grown to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s (SMBC) Bird Friendly criteria is bigger than ever before. At 19 million pounds, the total volume of Bird Friendly certified coffee produced has grown by 13 million pounds in the past decade. The number of certified producers participating in the program more than doubled in 2017, with more than 4,600 participants managing farms from Mexico to Colombia and Ethiopia to Thailand. Bird Friendly habitat covers more than 30,000 acres around the world.
When the coffee reaches its final destination – where it is roasted, packaged and sold – roasters can use the Smithsonian Bird Friendly seal to market their Bird Friendly coffees to consumers. These pennies-on-the-pound royalty fees fuel the program, as well as the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s cutting-edge ornithological research exploring the connections between birds, coffee and beyond.
Benefits of shade
Excitingly, some of the following studies cited in Mexico and Costa Rica were supported with funds from royalties remitted to SMBC by roasters involved in the Bird Friendly program. These remittances paid by forward-looking coffee roasters help to fund scientific work that would otherwise not be possible.
By reviewing more than 60 studies on shade-grown coffee farms in regions ranging from Central and South America to Indonesia over the past 25 years, the SMBC makes the case that shade-grown coffee production is the next best thing to a natural forest, and puts to rest any arguments about the comparative sustainability of sun-coffee systems.
While sun-grown systems can have higher yields, shaded farms easily outperform them in sustainability measurements. In study after study, habitat on shade-grown coffee farms outshone sun-grown coffee farms, with increased numbers and species of birds, improved bird habitat, soil protection/erosion control, carbon sequestration, natural pest control and improved pollination.
Trees provide an array of ecological services that offer both direct and indirect income and payback to farmers and the environment. In addition, farmers who shade their coffee may be less vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including increased temperatures and rainfall.
The “hidden yield” in the shade versus sun comparison is that of the non-coffee products and opportunities coming from the shaded system. In addition to ecotourism on several shade coffee farms, firewood, fruits, building materials and medicinal plants are all resources harvested to varying degrees by shade coffee farmers and used and/or sold by farmers.
Since SMBC introduced shade-grown coffee to the industry in 1996 at the first Sustainable Coffee Congress (which SMBC organised and hosted), the concept has garnered attention from importers and roasters looking to capture segmented markets, particularly in the specialty coffee sector. Many coffee producers, of course, have long known the benefits of shade.
Now, consumers can be happy to know that the shade-grown coffee they drink has extensive environmental value. And according to coffee connoisseurs, there is evidence that shade improves the taste.
The ecological dynamics
A review of more than 40 studies on the subject conducted in many producing countries over the past two decades has shown that these agroforestry systems – coffee grown in association with a diversity of trees providing shade as well as ecotourism opportunities and useful products, such as firewood, fruits, medicinal plants and construction materials – act in many ways, as the name implies, as forests.
For example, shade coffee trees provide extensive habitat, oftentimes in regions wracked by forest destruction and other landscape transformations harmful to natural ecosystems. The forest-like conditions of these systems allow for a wealth of ecological dynamics to occur, including increased bird habitat, soil protection/erosion control, carbon sequestration, natural pest control and improved pollination, making such systems vital for conservation initiatives.
While not all shade coffee farms might meet SMBC’s rigorous Bird Friendly criteria – which were developed in 1997 following the Sustainable Coffee Congress and define quality shade in terms of habitat – scientific field work bolsters the notion that having a mix of trees reaching a specific height and foliage density is a positive land-management practice that enhances biodiversity.
It is the high species and structural diversity of these shaded systems that creates the forest-like conditions, resulting in agricultural land use with great environmental value. Such farms cannot replace natural forest, as many animal species require natural areas. However, they support significant numbers of species, create the conditions for ecological processes and help to maintain landscapes that would otherwise be much poorer in biodiversity and, in some cases, vulnerable to deforestation.
The benefits of shade-grown coffee production only exist for coffee produced beneath a canopy that truly mimics forest conditions. Over the years, some companies have made claims that their coffee is shade-grown but have failed to certify to any particular criteria, creating what could be dubious or outright false marketing claims. The only way for consumers to know for certain is to look for a seal from a third-party, independent body that shows the production meets strict standards. The Bird Friendly logo is such a seal.
Some of the benefits of bird friendly coffee:
As a general rule, managing more trees as shade cover provides better habitat and supports a more diverse wildlife community than managing fewer trees. The few head-to-head comparisons between Bird Friendly and non-Bird Friendly coffee farms that have been conducted reveal that for maintaining biodiversity, Bird Friendly farms provide a better habitat.
- Coffee plantations in southern Mexico (Chiapas) offer habitat for 180 species of birds (46 of them migratory), a richness rivalled only by natural forest habitats in the region (Greenberg et al. 1997).
- Bird Friendly-quality farms in the Venezuelan Andes were shown to support up to 14 times the density of migratory birds compared to local primary forest (Bakermans et al. 2009). This is likely due to a greater abundance of bird-dispersed, small-fruit tree and shrub species, as well as more flowering plants that attract insects.
- In a study of shade versus sun coffee comparisons in Guatemala, overall bird abundance and diversity were 30 per cent and 15 per cent greater, respectively, in shaded farms than sun farms (Greenberg et al. 1997).
- Coffee farms in Costa Rica that have flowering plants within their borders have higher bee diversity than those without such flowering resources (nectar and pollen). Bee pollination has been shown to increase yields in coffee (Klein et al. 2003a, Klein et al. 2003b).
- More bees can contribute to a better harvest: large numbers of visits by honeybees correlate with higher coffee fruit set and fruit weight.
India is the only country in the world where the entire coffee cultivation is grown under shade, hand-picked and sun dried.
Source: Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute
