Certified Organic Coffee
Certified Organic Coffee Beans are grown without the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, just like other organic produce you may see in your local market.
Growing the beans this way not only gives you healthier coffee, it also provides a better working environment for the farmers and worker, and preserves the environment.
As with most industries, there are people who think they can grow coffee in bigger, better and more productive methods. They are clear cutting the rainforests, planting coffee plants that are more sun-tolerant, and using chemical fertilizers to feed the plants, and chemical pesticides to keep insects from attacking them.
Chemical fertilizers pump huge amounts of chemical nutrients into the plants at once. The chemicals infuse the ground, poisoning soil, water, and everything else they come into contact with. The soil erodes because the large trees are not there to hold it in place. Yet they produce a huge amount of coffee this way. Why is this so bad? Let’s take a closer look.
Certified Organic Shade Grown Coffee
The natural coffee plants prefer shade. Planted within the canopy of the rainforests they grow best. The rainforest not only provides shade, the large trees hold the soil in place, preventing erosion of the rich earth that coffee grows best in.Regional plants and animals keep insect pests away in return for having a sheltered place to live. Co-existing plants nurture the soil with nutrients… annually improving fertility rather than just taking out nutrients and not replacing them.
These Organic Shade Grown Coffee plants grow their beans more slowly, gradually letting the nutrients get to the beans. This results in a more flavorful, smooth tasting coffee bean.
Economically, the chemically farmed beans are produced in such numbers that the cost of raw coffee is kept very low. So low, that small farmers attempting to grow Certified Organic Coffee are having a tough time making a decent living. Yet they are spending the time and effort to grow better tasting beans than the large conglomerates. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?
To be a certified organic coffee farm, you need to change working conditions as well. In Organic Shade Grown Coffee fields, workers get to work in natural shade from the sun, they don’t have to handle any dangerous chemicals like fertilizers or pesticides, and they harvest beans over a long period of time as they naturally hit their peak.
In the large sun-drenched coffee fields that are not certified organic coffee fields, the type of beans is limited to more sun-tolerant varieties, farmers must toil out in the direct tropical sun, and harvest is done by every worker having to meet a very high quota for the day or they don’t make their full daily wage. They are exposed to dangerous chemicals when applying them to the fields, and again every time they enter the fields to work with the coffee plants.
Return from Certified Organic coffee to Coffee Home
Learn more about Organic Flavored Coffee
