Sustainable Harvest

Sitting at my desk in Portland, Oregon, I am a long way away from the farmers and communities who grow coffee. Yet amid my surroundings of computers, spreadsheets, and reports, I feel close to what’s happening in the field right now and connected to what will come tomorrow. Each small step I take here contributes to long-term changes in coffee growing communities from Central America to South America to East Africa. Although my reality is quite different than that of a coffee cooperative or farmer, I believe that our common goals enable us to align objectives and share experiences. I first came to learn the immediacy of the local and the gradual of the global seven years ago working in the flower trade in Ecuador. At the other end of the supply chain from where I sit now, I witnessed the challenges estate growers faced from dropping prices, labor pressures, and environmental impacts. Today, after pursuing a Masters degree in International Development, I have returned to global commodity trade with the aim to make an impact through my time with Sustainable Harvest and beyond. Over the summer, I have collaborated with cooperatives and the Sustainable Harvest offices at origin to measure the impact and sustainability of the company’s trade model. My journey has come full circle along the supply chain.

Sustainability is now in its second decade as a buzzword. Like many, I am still trying to understand exactly what it means. Surely, its definition varies depending on who you are, where you are, and what you do, as you add or take away from the mix of social, economic, and environmental ingredients of the sustainability recipe. With the framework and methodology we developed here at Sustainable Harvest, we prepared reports on our carbon footprint, our sustainability performance, and our suppliers’ sustainability.

To share our efforts to quantify our contribution to sustainable development, we’re writing a series of three blog posts to describe the scope of the process, the challenges, and the results as they unfold. This post discusses the trend of sustainability assessment as a tool to quantify qualitative descriptions of impact and enhance decision-making. The second post will focus on sustainability assessments conducted by independent, third-party organizations that evaluate our internal operations, most notably B Lab and Genuine Metrics. The last post of the series will address global sustainability initiatives and standards, and Sustainable Harvest’s pilot assessment of supplier sustainability. It will also address the challenges around that process and some of our initial findings on supplier well-being and needs.

Since emerging at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and gaining speed in both the Global North and South by the early 2000s, the concept of sustainable development has become mainstream. The trend of sustainability assessment and metrics emerged in the early 2000s as policymakers, managers and investors, civil society leaders, and the public began to demand evidence to support “green” claims. In response, consulting firms and experts such as the International Association for Impact Assessment organized and developed measurement tools. These tools help to analyze efficiency, effectiveness, and impact; demonstrate the extent of progress to management and key stakeholders; inform learning and strategic decision-making; compare actual results with those expected; ensure accountability; and ultimately, establish a strong foundation to bring sustainability efforts to scale.

Last month, we released a carbon footprint report that quantifies our business’ total carbon emissions. We see climate change as an increasing threat to the coffee supply chain, and it directly affects the farmers Sustainable Harvest works with in developing countries. Our sustainability team’s analysis shows 2009 CO2 emissions from the shipment of coffee in our legal possession (via ocean freight and trucking), as well as from staff air travel and from energy usage at all of our global offices (US, Mexico, Peru, and Tanzania). Our calculations show that carbon emissions from these activities totaled 657 metric tons (t) during 2009. In the process of transporting green coffee some 240,700 miles, 577t CO2e were emitted. In terms of operations, staff air travel resulted in estimated emissions of 78t CO2 and all office energy consumption emitted a total of 7t CO2. While approximately of 85% of our direct emissions are a result of shipping green coffee, it is important to note that coffee shipments transported by sea from origin to the US market contribute a relatively small portion (only 3 percent) of coffee’s total carbon footprint, on average (Clay, in Kornell 2009).

The carbon footprint report also analyzes the carbon sequestration from the Kigoma tree planting project in Tanzania. This initiative plants native tree species on denuded coffee plantations and was designed to restore local biodiversity, provide shade for coffee plants, reduce runoff, and sequester carbon. From 2008-2010, the project has planted 131,800 trees that will sequester an average of 805t CO2 each year.4 We estimate that this project sequesters 20% more carbon than we emit through business activities. The Kigoma project is one example of the ways in which Sustainable Harvest and coffee roasters support sustainability projects to improve conditions in the communities and ecosystems where their coffee is sourced.

Measuring our carbon footprint report is the first step in sustainability assessment and metrics that reinforce our work and the impact of our trade model. Another significant step is third-party certification and analysis, like B Lab and Genuine Metrics, the topic of our next blog post.

- David Short

Honey coffee drying at Las Lajas farm

In coffee growing regions throughout the world, the effects of climate change are beginning to threaten farmers’ livelihoods established through generations of hard work. In many countries, producers are taking note and seeking ways to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

In Colombia, severe weather over the past few years has resulted in the lowest coffee yield in more than three decades. Warming weather contributed to heavier rainfall during the wet season, causing the growth of leaf rust on coffee plants and worsening beetle infestations. As climate change continues, Colombian coffee farmers are faced with difficult choices in the years ahead: expensive preventative measures may raise coffee prices but switching to hardier varieties can decrease cup quality. The farmers’ decisions will affect the global coffee market.

In Costa Rica, Sustainable Harvest’s supplier partners face similar challenges as a result of climate change. Coffee farmer Minor Corrales, a member of the AFAORCA farmers’ association in Tarrazú, has seen the regular patterns of rain and sun that his father and grandfather relied on for decades replaced by more unpredictable and extreme weather. The region experienced unusually warm weather last December and January, resulting in an earlier harvest as cherries ripened faster than normal. North of San José, the family-owned farm Las Lajas sells a sun-dried honey coffee that is increasingly difficult to produce as periods of sunlight become less predictable and consistent.

Across coffee growing regions of Latin America, the timing of planting, harvest, and drying carefully honed over generations to produce the best yield and quality for each unique micro-climate may no longer be applicable. Although many farmers have so far been able to adapt to minor deviations from normal temperature and rainfall patterns, the increasing pace of such changes will make it more difficult to adjust in the future.

Harvesting shade-grown coffee

Sustainable Harvest is working with farmers and other stakeholders to identify ways to reduce the impact of climate change on coffee growing communities. In unforested areas, one possible approach is to plant shade trees over coffee plants to reduce local temperature variations. Both environmental and economic measures are necessary. By establishing transparent market linkages, providing training in quality, and assisting with organic or Fair Trade certifications that bring higher prices, Sustainable Harvest also helps ensure that farmers have the income security to survive a poor harvest. We’re also helping farmers in Central America diversify their farms with special attention to improving their families’ food security. That way, even if the coffee yield is lower in a given year, farmers will still be able to adequately feed their families. Although climate change poses significant challenges to coffee farming communities, we hope to reduce those risks through collaborative efforts to find, introduce, and support innovative approaches in Latin America and worldwide.

Katie Gilmer and Don Fernando of Coocafe

Katie Gilmer, a relationship coffee manager at Sustainable Harvest, recently traveled to Costa Rica to gather information on best practices at coffee mills to share with our network of suppliers. Her experience on the trip illustrates the tangible benefits resulting from a focus on quality, no matter the mill’s scale.

She started off with a visit to a large, traditional dry mill. The mill processes hundreds of thousands of pounds of coffee each day, and it was evident that quality control at that scale is difficult to manage. She said, “The coffee cherries passed through dirty channels before being fermented, and were then dumped in mechanical dryers fired by entire tree trunks.”

Afterward, Katie visited one of our suppliers, the family-owned farm and mill Las Lajas in Alajuela. Katie said, “The difference made quite an impact on me. Las Lajas is a small farm with an ecological mill where the Chacon family makes sure that everything is clean and meets the highest standards for quality. After seeing a mill where everything is mechanized, the more artisanal Las Lajas process exemplified how a personal touch can really matter for the quality of the coffee. The larger, more efficient mill employed 60 people and probably processed 200 times what Las Lajas does with 12 people. But I would prefer to drink the coffee from Las Lajas.”

Francisca Chacon of Las Lajas farm with her children

While attention for quality is simpler at a small mill like Las Lajas, a visit to the Coocafe mill in Heredia provided Katie with examples of the kinds of systems and machinery that can process coffee at a medium scale while still prioritizing quality. The mill is owned and operated by a consortium of  co-ops, who take great pride in their coffee’s quality. When staff like Katie facilitate the spread of best practices across our network of suppliers, ideas developed at any scale may end up creating big benefits for coffee farmers and consumers.

The week before Let’s Talk Coffee, Sustainable Harvest is partnering with Selva Negra farm to host the Seed to Cup Challenge and the Q Grader training program.  Read on to learn more about Selva Negra.

Mausi Kuhl, co-owner of Selva Negra farm.

At the entrance to Selva Negra coffee farm in the mountains of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, children play on a tank abandoned during the civil war. The dichotomy is reflective of the farm itself, where trash is seen as a resource and manure is biodigested to produce electricity.  Waste to energy. Tank to playground. As in the natural world, the life-death-life cycles of the farm continually recycle .

Mausi and Eddy Kuhl, descendants of 19th-century German settlers, returned to their 1500-acre farm after the end of Nicaragua’s bloody civil war to rebuild. Faced with the daunting prospect of starting over, they decided to adopt a cyclical model of agriculture based on natural systems.  Although the workers and guests number the size of a small town, so much of their waste is recycled or reused that only a single large bin of trash is shipped out each week.  Mausi hopes someday to end the shipments entirely.

Human and animal waste is pumped into biodigesters that generate methane for cookstoves and treated manure for the farm’s orchards.  Compostable trash and pulp from coffee production is placed in a worm farm to be turned into fertilizer.  The farm generates nearly three million pounds of fertilizer each year to be applied to coffee plants and used in greenhouses that grow food for 200 permanent workers and their families.  Coffee pulp is also used in biodigesters to produce methane that is burned to power a small electric turbine.  The remainder of the farm’s energy comes from a micro-hydro installation running off the lagoon behind the restaurant of the farm’s eco-lodge.

Selva Negra coffee being weighed.

The food for the restaurant, like that for the workers, is grown organically on the farm itself.  The meat comes from free-range animals, and the farm dairy provides milk, cheese, and yogurt.  Undisturbed rainforest rises dramatically above the restaurant, covering a third of the farm’s total area.  The transition from rainforest to the shade-grown coffee that covers another third of the farm is barely noticeable.  The coffee itself is Rainforest Alliance certified, with substantial acreage also certified organic.  A laboratory for research on organic farming methods produces natural insect repellents and cultures forest bacteria to be added to compost and fertilizer.

The laboratory is staffed by exchange students and children of farm workers returned from university.  Most permanent workers live with their families, and the farm clinic, school, and library provide for their needs in this remote mountain valley.  A carpentry shop, metal shop, and machine shop allow furniture, greenhouse frames, and other items to be made or repaired at the farm itself, adding to Selva Negra’s self-sufficiency.

The promise of Selva Negra grows from the potential found in seemingly opposed paradigms: native plant knowledge strengthened by laboratory science, a coffee business taking root beneath rainforest canopy, plans of future progress nourished by a respect for history.  Life and death.  Not opposites, but cycles through which we connect and reconnect to the natural world, the rhythms of traditional agriculture returning to the modern world.  Each morning when the workers of Selva Negra rise at dawn, the roars of howler monkeys boom through the forest like the echo of artillery.  At the entrance to a farm that fosters so much life, a dead tank rusts silently into the soil.

Two weeks ago, nearly fifty women in remote Kigoma, Tanzania took a step towards greater control of their own food security: they learned to grow high-protein mushrooms. Their teacher was Chido Govero, a young Zimbabwean woman with experience training orphans and other highly vulnerable people to grow mushrooms in her home country. Chido was brought to the Kanyovu Coffee Cooperative in Tanzania as part of the Mushroom Pilot Project, made possible by the collaboration of Sustainable Harvest, Equator Coffees of California, and the Zero Emissions Research Initiatives (ZERI) Foundation.

Participants in the Mushroom Pilot Project learn to create substrate out of coffee pulp that is ideal for growing protein-rich mushrooms

The Mushroom Pilot Project is an effort to combat food insecurity and malnutrition for the rural poor in Kigoma by training local women how to grow nutrient-rich mushrooms out of coffee pulp, a by-product of the coffee harvest that piles up, often unused, in the villages of the coffee-growing regions of Eastern Africa.

“I had no idea you could grow mushrooms–I thought you could only gather them wild from the forest,” one training participant exclaimed. “People like mushrooms, and in the dry season they can’t find them. They will be amazed!”

Govero trained the women to create a substrate using coffee pulp and other organic waste from the women’s homes, creating an ideal environment for cultivating mushroom spores. The first few days of training involved classroom instruction and practical demonstrations. Then, the women applied what they learned to great success. As Chido remarked, ”These women are very quick learners. I just stood back and let them help each other, and they worked through all the steps themselves.”

The crew on the ground in Tanzania, including Chido, Sustainable Harvest’s Sara Morocchi, and Rasmus, a helper from ZERI, did run into a few minor challenges during the pilot. For instance, a common practice in Kigoma is to offer a stipend to individuals who attend training courses.  Sustainable Harvest does not provide stipends, and we knew this might be seen unfavorably by the women participating in the Mushroom Pilot Project. In fact, some of the women did drop out of the course after the first day when they found out they would not be paid to attend. However, the week-long training continued with the most dedicated of the women we had selected, those that were truly motivated to be there and learn this new skill.

The women who participated in the Mushroom Pilot Project were dedicated to learning a skill that would improve their livelihood

It might seem strange that a coffee importing company is helping teach families in Tanzania strategies to improve their food security. But many of us here at Sustianable Harvest live and work in coffee producing communities, and we know the daily reality of farmers and their families. Although we help farmers earn more income from their specialty coffee, there are times when market fluctuations or bad weather put farmers’ livelihoods at risk if they depend on coffee alone. We believe initiatives like the Mushroom Pilot Project are critical to help farmers take advantage of the strategies they have to support their families while cultivating coffee and food crops in environmentally responsible ways.