REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE IN COFFEE FARMING

I watched that gut health doco on Netflix a few weeks ago. I loved it. Particularly the stop motion felt intestines and bacteria and other gut related things. And I loved how excited the main scientist presenter got about microbiomes, bacteria and… poo. There was a point I had to skip over, a part that got a little too visually invested in faecal matter for my comfort, but other than that, so interesting.

What I learned about microbiomes, is how much they do for our guts – help breakdown food and mine the nutrients we need to be healthy, which in turn aids our immune system, mental health, and all our organs. After watching the doco, I felt a surge to foster and care for my little gut microbiomes, as tenderly as a gardener would tend to her prize winning gardenias. I even made a spreadsheet to graph the variety of my food intake to see where I could improve in my food diversity and fibre intake – I’m doing okay! I already love kimchi!

Now to tie this in with what is actually relevant to regenerative agriculture and coffee – the foundation of regenerative agriculture is soil health. Soil is like your gut, it needs a wide variety of microbiomes to break down and absorb the nutrients it gets from rain, the atmosphere, surrounding plants and animals, and decaying plants and animals. Healthy soil grows healthy plants, reduces soil erosion, and supports a complex biodiverse ecology to foster flora, wildlife and more microbiomes.

This practice is not new, it’s one of the oldest forms of agriculture, used by the indigenous people of the americas for thousands of years.

This looks very different to the industrial, monocrops we’re used to seeing as we drive up the coast seeing hectares upon hectares of wheat or sugarcane, and even quite different from the companion farming we see in coffee farms, where larger crop trees are planted to shade the coffee plants below, but a real smorgasbord of cover crops, fungi, shrubs, trees, flowers and vines. The land isn’t tilled between harvests as this disrupts the ecological systems built up in soil, crops are planted all in amongst each other, it’s what’s lovingly called ‘messy farming.’

The benefits taking this holistic approach of focussing on the soil rather than the crop bring a multitude of benefits to coffee almost as a byproduct: the diverse range of plants and fungi fill the soil with nitrogen and microorganisms – providing food for the coffee plant to grow strong, and reducing the need for fertilisers, and improving the structure of the soil as to retain moisture and reducing soil erosion, reducing water waste and increased ability to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere, thereby contributing to reducing harmful warming of the atmosphere; the flowers and fruit attract birds to propagate seeds and fertilise through their excrement (I went too long without talking about it, I had to include it in somewhere), and insects to pollinate and eat other pests – reducing the need for pesticides and increasing crop yield. All while contributing to the soil health which will ensure healthier and stronger coffee plants in the future.

With all the environmental, financial and production benefits, it will be very exciting to see regenerative coffee farming gain popularity in the specialty coffee world.

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE IN COFFEE FARMING

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