Climate Change and Coffee

You probably won’t believe it, but if you drink coffee, you could be contributing to climate change.  But there is a way to prevent that from happening.  If you drink organic coffee, you will be helping to stop climate change.

Growing Coffee

This may all sound preposterous, but it is true.  Organic coffee and non-organic coffee are grown in two different ways.  The traditional non-organic way of growing coffee contributes to climate change.  The organic way of growing coffee does not contribute to climate change.

Non-Organic Way

Early on, humans figured out that coffee was a great product.  It tasted pretty good, but more importantly, it could be sold for a nice tidy profit.  

The problem was that in the olden days, coffee trees grew randomly in warm tropical forests. These forests commonly had a thick canopy of other trees that shaded the coffee trees.  These forests had temperatures that hovered around 70 degrees most of the time.  The dense canopy of trees shed a nice bed of leaves that eventually decayed into rich soil.  The coffee trees were very happy.  

Then the humans got involved.  They liked the profits from selling coffee beans, so they got greedy.  They decided they needed to grow tons of coffee trees so they could sell tons of coffee beans.  Having random coffee trees spread around the forest just wasn’t going to cut it.

Plantations

Europeans entered the picture and turned the production of coffee into an agricultural industry.  They cleared acres and acres of the natural warm tropical forest so they could plant nice long rows of coffee trees.

Understandably, the coffee trees were not happy.  They love shade, and there was no more shade.  Large plantation owners had to use chemicals to help the coffee trees flourish in full sun.  They also had to search for beans that would put up with full sun.  

Since there was no canopy shading the coffee trees, there was no lush bed of leaves falling down on the soil, so the soil became less fertile.  In order to get the coffee trees growing, the plantation owners had to use chemicals to fertilize the unfertile soil.

Insects 

Since the forest was gone, the harmful insects flourished.  Before the land was cleared, there would have been birds to eat the harmful insects.  There would have been lizards to eat the harmful worms.  But now, the plantation owner had to use more chemicals to control the harmful insects.  The chemicals killed the harmful insects but also destroyed the insects that were beneficial to the coffee trees.

You can see where this is going.  Today's non-organic coffee farming methods introduce tons of harmful chemicals into the air and the soil, thereby contributing to climate change. 

And don’t forget how clear-cutting the tropical forests is taking away valuable clean air that the forests used to provide.  Plus, the runoff from the plantations contains all those chemicals so that is polluting the water supply for the native people in the area of the farms.