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(soothing music)

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It's addictive.

Just the smell.

Then you get to the taste and that's it, you're hooked.

I think there's this kind of magical thing

about drinking coffee with other people.

People get together, they drink their coffee

and they talk.

And it's not through a cell phone or an iPad.

It's face-to-face.

Coffee is one of these great drinks

to promote communication.

It's one of those great excuses to invite somebody to talk.

A lot of people drink it

because of the pick me up benefits that it provides.

There's no doubt about that.

There's something innate about drinking coffee.

It just has an earthy character to it.

And it's the first thing they put in your mouth

in the morning.

There's a certain ritual that has made it such a popular

beverage for those reasons.

And people look for it everywhere.

The real challenge is for us to make that experience

better for people as farmers, as roasters, as retailers,

we can do that.

And at the same time hopefully,

make it better for the planet.

So we have a lot of work to do.

And now is the perfect time

to really work toward that together.

Coffee is a bush.

In fact, it's an understory crop from East Africa.

That's where it occurs naturally.

They took this shade loving shrub

and stuck it in a tropical forest and it prospered.

So coffee grows at high altitude

in a belt around the equator in the tropics.

The whole world knows

the birth place of coffee is Ethiopia.

(African upbeat music)

Coffee is big in Ethiopia.

If you drive around or walk around

even in any downtown area,

any city, you see Ethiopian coffee ceremony happening

and people actually love coffee.

(African upbeat music)

Coffee you're not going to plant it in the city.

Coffee is a really in the remote area,

very dark from the city.

You drive, and drive and drive.

By the end of the day, when you get there,

it might've be rain, muddy, slippery, so that's not is.

You should like that job.

If you don't like, if it is muddy,

oh I don't like this muddy, I'm gonna go back home.

No, you go fight against the muddy.

So you need to have four wheel drive car.

Sometimes the car get break down you see.

And then when the get a breakdown

and then people started pushing the car and then together,

altogether you go on the top of the mountain

where the coffee is.

So it's not easy.

(African upbeat music)

My name is Akmel Nuri.

I'm a coffee farmer in (indistinct).

My farm is 200 hectares altogether.

The altitude is from 1,600-2,135 in between.

When our country become to the communist,

the (indistinct) nationalized my father's coffee,

and then I left the country.

So after I graduate and he goes Latvia, I went to America.

I was working a lot of works there and then saving money

because I have a dream.

I have a goal.

It was inside of me to have my own coffee farm.

(birds chirping)

I started from scratch.

It was not easy, but I make it.

I did it.

I'm very happy.

Now I have 200 hectares of coffee.

That was my dream.

The dream comes true.

And then this time when I see my farm,

that gives me a really inside of satisfaction.

It is my therapy, especially when I see the forest,

because I am really a nature person.

I like nature.

There you go.

We're in the middle of the jungle.

I feel so inside fully know when I come here.

Free therapy.

My coffee is not only just regular coffee.

It is a forest coffee.

It is really deep forest.

You can say, this is a coffee from reforest.

Coffee loves to live with the trees.

Coffee needs a shed,

Nature makes coffee beautiful.

(birds chirping)

Shade grown coffee is coffee that has a tall trees over it

that provide shade and the shade is like a forest.

It can also provide pretty good habitat

for wildlife in general.

Now it can't replace natural forest.

We should never say that.

But for agricultural land use

that is economically productive

and give something to farmers for doing what they do

and also has this dimension of environmental benefits,

that's a pretty good, a pretty good system.

There's not a lot of cultivated crops and plants

that can make that claim.

Coffee is a forest plant.

So if you're a forest plant, you grow in shade.

You may not be able to plant as densely in shade,

but you plant far more closely to its natural habitat.

And so that's what you're trying to replicate.

You're trying to get a moderated shade, not no sun,

but you're trying to get that dappled

so that the sun comes through, but there is shade.

There is cool.

There is moisture.

Moisture is very important.

The shades part of the moisture.

I'm Dorienne Rowan Campbell, and my farm is Rowan's Royale.

The blue mountains are exquisite.

It's a real privilege to have a farm there.

They're beautiful.

And the flavor of our blue mountain coffee is exceptional.

It's eight acres.

A great deal of the farm is just in forest

because it's just too steep to cultivate anything on.

It would not be ecologically sound to plant on it.

So we have about three acres where we can plant coffee

and I've probably got an acre and a half

where the coffee's planted.

It's not planted as closely as might be recommended,

but it is an organic farm, it has to be sustainable.

So there's a lot of other life that has to go on,

on farm apart from the coffee.

Yes, a lot of birds, a lot of birds.

Yeah, yeah, lot of birds.

It can be (indistinct) a lot of birds.

(indistinct) and you name it.

(indistinct).

We have more than which, we have white belly.

We have (indistinct).

What it makes a nice song the bird watch (indistinct)

on the road.

(indistinct).

My dad bought this farm when I was about 12.

And so a lot of the big trees there have been friends

for many, many years.

He always did have a fair amount of trees,

but not the amount of shade that I really want to have.

My dad stopped cultivating in about '77

and I didn't start on the farm until '92.

So it meant that I had a fresh slate.

I could start doing what I needed to do,

and I could learn doing it

without making too many disastrous mistakes.

And so I began to teach myself about organic.

And it was teacher self

'cause at that time, if you tried to go online,

it was very, very expensive.

Then I began to realize that part of going organic

was making certain that you had the right mix

of shade trees, flowering trees, shrubs, grasses.

And so I began my quest for shade coffee.

(soothing music)

You can grow coffee in two ways,

you can grow at a sun coffee,

or you can grow it a shade coffee.

Sun coffee is highly productive.

You actually get more beans per hectare

than you do with shade coffee

but there's a price to pay for that.

On the one hand, you can have higher yields,

a lot of coffee coming out of the land,

but you then have some other issues

that you have to deal with.

Soil erosion, perhaps water contamination,

workers being exposed to agrochemicals pesticides.

So there's some trade-offs there.

If all farms were to go conventional sun grown,

well we'd have a lot of coffee in the world

and we'd probably also have some very long-term consequences

to deal with because of the way the land is treated.

Well, because that's really not how coffee wants to grow.

They beautifully planted out very close together

and it's very hard to find a tree that's anywhere near it.

Yes, and you'll get a lot of bearing,

but it's not sustainable.

You're going to have to keep putting more and more inputs,

usually other chemical kind into it

to get it to keep producing

because there's nothing regenerative about it.

I think shade coffee is far more regenerative.

It allows the plant to rest more

because the shade is doing part of the work.

(birds chirping)

I'm Jefferson Shriver.

I'm the owner of Gaia Estate here in Nicaragua.

This farm has about 115 years of coffee history.

And so if you looked around the farm,

it's mostly a rustic shade.

This is the way coffee was originally grown.

So basically they just took out the understory of a forest,

clear the understory,

kept the forest and started growing coffee here.

One of the first things we're really proud

about with this farm is the fact that it has trees

that are anywhere from 50 years

to some say 200, 250 years old.

When you walk the farm,

you just get a sense that there are all kinds

of living organisms and animals and trees and crops

that are feeding off one or the other.

So there's a lot of misconceptions

about what shade grown coffee is and what it isn't.

Shade grown coffee isn't just coffee

that's grown perhaps underneath a banana plant.

It really needs to look a lot like a forest looks like.

We have fruit trees, first is that first story.

We have fast growing forest trees

that are a part of that second story there.

Those might also be taller fruit trees.

And then we have these larger third story

that last story of the shade system,

those are usually our oldest

and that combination of shade is just great

for the whole system.

Now you have to manage that shape

'cause sun does have to come through the branches

and photosynthesis has to interact with the plant.

You can see the leaf structure there.

Leaf structure is that then it allows a lot of sun

to come in,

and because they're so kind of thin in that sense,

they easily mulch back into the soil.

I've always been interested in this relationship

between forests and how we can sustain forests as humans,

but at the same time,

how agriculture can mingle with that

and humans can make a living from an agro forestry system.

Coffee really is a great crop for the mixing

of those two worlds because it's a shade tolerant crop.

(birds chirping)

You choose at least what we do is choose

the most beautiful, big and red

and healthy cherry.

And that will eventually become a seed

that we will plant in a nursery.

This turns into a tree.

There are certain different methods of how to do it,

but you dry it, you wash it.

Then you put it in a bag and it starts growing,

growing, growing for about 10 months, 11 months.

And then you transport each bag one tree to the farm,

and then manually you put it.

You open a hole in the ground, you put some fertilizer,

a little conditioner to the ground, and then you plant it.

Then it's a year long process.

It's a non-stop process.

You have to clear the small plant from weeds.

You have to fertilize it.

You have to take care of the shade.

You have to also take care of it when the plant gets sick,

you need to give him medicine, vitamins,

so he grows healthy and strong.

No active spots.

No, its okay.

My name is Jan Carlo Handtke and I'm a coffee farmer.

I manage five different (indistinct)

and I've dedicated my life to farming coffee.

I've been doing it for about 10 years.

I spent 100% of my time doing it.

That's what I do for a living and I love it.

My family has been growing coffee for more than 100 years.

So I was always around coffee since I was a little kid.

So I like to think that I chose coffee,

but I'm not sure if coffee chose me.

After I finished college,

I took the decision to do this for a living

and get really involved in the producing and processing

and selling coffee.

Nice.

I'm here every day and every day I'm amazed

of how it's growing healthy and green.

And it's looking very good.

You can tell that he will,

he will have a lot of coffee actually next year.

All these you see will be the future flowers.

And after the flowering, they will become coffee cherries.

It's what we have been doing for decades.

And I really wish my kids will love coffee as much as I do.

So it's a lifestyle for me.

It's my way of living.

What I do for fun.

It's basically everything.

I could not imagine being at another place.

I love being around green, I love being in the mountains,

hearing birds, hearing animals,

hearing the wind in the trees,

instead of hearing like cars or machines

or people around me.

I think it's a very healthy way of living,

being productive and enjoying yourself and enjoying nature

and make a living out of it's a blessing.

So coffee is a shrub that takes three years

to get its first crop.

So you have to plant a seedling

that can come from your own seed, no problem.

And it grows up to usually about two meters.

Then you wanna be pruning it

so you don't want it to get too high.

And after three years you get your first harvest.

And if you are fertilizing it well, you're pruning it well

you're getting good weeding around it.

The coffee can be quite productive.

You have to have a reasonable amount of rainfall

and some good humidity in the soil.

It's always helpful to have cool nighttime temperatures

as well.

So most coffee is grown above, say 600 meters,

five to 600 meters.

And ideally I'd say 1,000 to 1,500 meters.

And that is how coffee is grown for the most part, yeah.

That same coffee shrub can last anywhere

from 15 up to 30 years, if you're doing regular pruning.

What takes place during the growing season

is a lot of cleaning, filling, looking after the trees,

definitely it's a year round effort.

The cherry is gonna emerged from the tree,

they come out in the color green

and then they start to turn ripe

in September, October, November.

We measure the sugar content, the bricks of sugar.

And it's kind of like a wine grower does.

We pick the cherries when they're deep red,

it's a quality issue, okay.

So you can correlate how good the coffee's gonna be

by how good your pick is.

I'm one of the two owners of Finca Dos Jefes

in Boquete, Chiriqui Republic of Panama.

We're a small farm, 2.7 hectares.

I came to Panama in 2002 to visit Panamanian friends.

I'm from San Francisco in the United States.

We fell in love with the graciousness

of the Panamanian people.

And we came back a few months after our first visit

and we're looking for a piece of land

to build a small home on,

At the end of two days of looking

and they asked us if we'd like to see

an abandoned coffee farm, I said, sure, why not?

And they drove us up the hill.

We saw the property on a Thursday night,

purchased it the next morning

and then had to figure out how to become coffee farmers.

What I will tell you is that when the coffee bug bit me,

it took over my entire life.

Harvest generally take about four months on the farm.

Everything doesn't turn red at the same time.

And that's why it's so labor intensive,

you'll work in the area of the farm,

take everything deep, red in color off of it

and move picking someplace else and then we turn.

Each tree picked between eight and 10 times

during the four month period.

And everything's picked individually

in the pinching-twisting motion

so that you can leave the stem on

for the following years growth.

About 20 weeks after the picking

a small white flower comes out.

It's a very magical time to be on a coffee farm.

You'd go to bed at night and everything is green.

The first flowering of the year

and you wake up, it looks like it's snowed.

Maybe 20,000 little white flowers on the farm.

The aromas are intoxicating, lavender, licorice,

jasmine, rolled into one and it permeates the area.

It's really, really spectacular.

The flowers don't stay on very long though,

they fall off in three or four days.

They leave a small bud and then the bud takes nine months

to turn into a full-size green cherry.

And then we start that cycle again.

What we do here is we hand pick them,

put them in a basket is to, which is tied to your waist.

So the pickers have their two hands free

and they're able to hold themselves in the rain,

which is one even, or it's wet.

So it's slippery.

One of the things that we make sure that we do

is to pick those cherries

when they're at their ripest moment.

They can just be pulled off

the branch of the plant effortlessly.

And pickers know exactly how to do that.

And one of the ways that we incentivize that

is to pay workers, a better price for the coffee

that they're picking of the highest quality.

So we will do that

and pickers are really proud to be working with us

because they get a better wage for what they're picking

and they know they're picking the highest quality coffee.

So they really take pride in that.

Most of the pickers are women at this point in time.

And we know them very well.

We know their families.

We have a relationship with them and we really take care of

that picking process.

That's just to know how many beans on each

of these up here.

It will be about a hundred beans in here.

Once the coffee is ripe,

you pick only the red cherries

and those red cherries are hold to a processing station.

You have a lot of options of how to process the coffee.

You can do a fully washed coffee, semi washed coffee,

natural honeys.

You can drain them in the patios.

You can drain them in raised beds.

You can drain them in a machine.

So it's what your consumer, your buyer wants.

At the end of the day, you take your bag to the wet mill.

And what we do is a separation process with water,

the heavier beans go to the bottom of the container

and the floaters are classified because they're lighter.

We deport the coffee, ferment the coffee, wash the coffee,

and then after we wash it,

we send it to the patio to dry the coffee.

And after three or four days,

the coffee is then ready to sit in parchment

in the warehouse.

You need to have a lot of patients

and you have to have a high amount of knowledge

because the process can go wrong at any given time.

And so if you are harvesting the beans,

when they're not quite red enough,

if you're fermenting the beans

and you don't ferment long enough, or you ferment too long,

if you are taking off or removing the mucilage

and you don't really get all that, mucilage off.

If you're drying and you don't get the right humidity,

the quality of the cup can be completely changed.

When people drink their cup of coffee,

they don't realize all of it's going on beforehand.

And it's an incredible process.

(upbeat music)

The alternative to the wash method

is the natural method, okay?

It's, what's done in a lot of the African countries.

It's what's being done out here.

It's taking the cherries, keeping them intact

and putting them onto a raised drying bed.

On this farm,

the very first thing that we do when we pick the cherries,

is we float them in a wheel barrow full of water, okay.

98, 99% will drop directly to the bottom in a normal year.

So we have one to 2% floating.

Those that float we know will never be good coffee.

They don't have the right nutrient material.

We skim them and compost them.

The other 98% go onto the drying beds.

And they sit in the sun on this farm for 20 to 25 days

of good sunshine.

Good sunshine is the operative word in that statement, okay?

Every evening or whenever it threatens to rain,

they need to be covered.

It's labor-intensive.

Two guys maybe three hours every evening,

during our four month drying period.

At that point,

we allow the coffee to rest for a minimum of 90 days.

During that resting period,

the properties of the coffee settle down

and the coffee gets becomes better, okay.

First the station take off the screen,

and then the dirt, the dark one, there's small size.

And then the broken one, we will take it away.

And then also the color soft, color soft is taking off

the green one and much coffee and then some unusual color.

So it will take it off.

Finally, if something passed from machine,

the last destination is the human being.

The ladies are picking something,

which machine did not get it.

Coffee is very is sweet when you drink it.

And it's not easy to prepare from A to Z,

when you come from down to here, long process.

Okay, now we are talking about coffee, farm,

(indistinct) agriculture, technique, everything you see.

This is all about coffee.

You see here, is all coffee ready to export.

Something that's always important

when you're looking to buy a new coffee is the sweetness

and the clean cup.

That is what shows us if the coffee farmer

or collaborative have been doing a good job in what they do.

You can't really have a sweet and clean cup

unless you have ripe cherries

and everything throughout the whole way from them to us

has been good.

My name is Casper Engel Rasmussen.

I am a roaster in charge of the quality of roast

that coffee collected.

Where I'm in charge of buying is in Ethiopia

and here we work with two different companies.

One is Akmel Nuri,

and then we worked with a company called Metad.

The way we taste the coffees is that we set up a cupping.

It's kind of like a standard way of tasting coffee

in the coffee industry.

With Metad, we can go they have like a professional setup

and it's just a amazing place to go and taste coffees.

I mean, there are so good at roasting it.

Everything is set up exactly how you want it.

So it's a very precise way to taste the coffees.

So when they cup, they use our laboratory,

they evaluate the raw coffee.

What that looks like, smells like and all that.

And, but actually cup, we always code them

so they don't know which is which.

So we get an honest response feedback of their cupping.

So that's how they select.

The more we cup with them, the more we know

what kind of coffee profile they're looking for.

A cupping is set up quite simple.

It's like, you'll have a certain amount of coffee,

boiling water, just on the boiling.

Let it sit for four minutes, then you stir.

Make sure it's like stirred everything,

so everything that's extracted, it's blended.

And then you just let it sit,

skim the creamer that's on top.

And then you just slip it with a spoon.

And it's a horrible sound.

(slurping loudly)

So you have both flavor and aroma at once.

Flavor is what you have on the tongue.

So that is the sweetness and acidity.

Whereas the aromas is the stuff

that you get through the nose

and that's where it can catch some florals.

And so it has almost green strawberry for me,

like not fully developed

and but also like black currant and just,

yeah, super intense.

(Casper slurping)

It's very delicate, and citrus, bergamot

and very clean and lacks maybe a bit of sweetness.

Yeah, I have peach again.

And some honey and melon.

I scored here (indistinct).

It's just very, very complex coffee.

There a lot of layers keep tasting it

and tasting something different each time.

Yeah, we were going back and forth.

This one has more acidity,

but this one is just so sweet and just clean

and just (indistinct).

This is Natural Hambela Buku.

Okay.

Last, Washed Hambela, Benti Nenqa.

This one, the first one?

(indistinct).

2014 was the first year

we bought Akmel's coffee.

Yeah Akmel's was just such a, a likable fellow.

It's just like the way he talks about his farm

and also the nature and how wild it is there

for him is about growing it as natural as possible.

It's like any,

I mean I've never seen any farm like that before.

I've been down south and met some guys

that they're so professional in it,

everything is so well organized.

And I was like, wow, this is, this is cool.

Akmel could maybe learn something from this.

We agreed to do a little road trip.

We drove down to (indistinct) and (indistinct)

and visited some corporate (indistinct) and farms there

for him to see how they do it.

It's not to tell him this is how you should do it,

but just talk to them, get some inspiration,

meet others that work in the same field.

We got to talk to one of the agronomist there

and they got along really well.

So it was very much them going together out into forest,

talking about different techniques.

It's amazing to see how we can work together

on doing something better.

This will grow, grow fast

and they use it for five or six years.

And then the other one will (indistinct).

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Then the other one will grow taller

and then it will give the shade.

The coffee bean is just a seed inside a cherry.

So when you take it out it's green

and it's almost hard as a stone.

Sometime in history,

people figured out that if you roast this,

you can actually create some aromas.

We just turned something that tastes like grass

into something that tastes like coffee.

When we receive the samples of the coffees,

we have to make a decision what we wanna do with it.

We have this test roaster. So we test everything.

So we kind of already know when we received the coffees,

what do we wanna achieve with this coffee?

Is it to be used for espresso?

Is it to be used for filter?

And then it's just, you know, all based on experience.

So what do you want to create a coffee?

Do you want us to be like super wild and aromatic?

Does it have that by nature?

Then that's what we wanna highlight.

If it's just a very balanced, smooth, sweet coffee,

then we wanna highlight that.

And then we roast to another degree.

You have to know what you're roasting,

every variety.

Every coffee has its own roasting profile.

It's not the same to roast (indistinct) grown in 700 meters,

then Borbone at 1,700 meters.

It's just a totally different thing.

So a roaster can either make the coffee better

or it can make the coffee worse.

And every variety behaves difference inside the barrel.

You have to know exactly how much time, the temperature,

how much time after the first crack and all that.

So it's another world.

You have to adjust the profile

as the green coffee comes in,

because every bag of coffee is different.

This is handpicked, hand processed coffees.

So I think it's really important to roast it properly.

Roasting is a science.

It's where the flavor comes from.

It's where you bring out the best of the coffee.

It's where, if you start with good coffee or great coffee,

the way you roast it can enhance it or ruin it.

It's a really skilled artisan process

and it takes a long time to learn to do it right.

To be a good coffee roaster,

I think you need to be very focused.

You need to be able to like,

do the exact same thing each time.

So you only change one parameter at a time

'cause then you can actually test the coffees.

That is one thing, and then be good at tasting coffee,

taste, everything you do.

So what we always do is when we are to learn anything

about a coffee, you do two almost identical roasts.

We make one slight change and then its A B cupping,

so it's like everything we do we taste it,

and from that we learn every single day.

On the cupping table,

it's more about the nuance of the specific roast.

What is it that makes this one better than the other?

What if we do different?

It's just a long process of trial and error.

We have all these different graphs that we can look at.

When we combine that, we taste everything.

All of a sudden,

we have this big puzzle where we can go in

and actually see what creates more sweetness,

what creates more acidity.

So we can use this as a tool

to learn more about roasting coffee.

Every roast degree is a preference.

So if something is dark roast for me,

maybe that's a light roast for others.

So instead of talking about light or dark,

I'd rather just say that we rose to the degree,

we feel is the best to suit the coffee and the brewing

(soothing music)

In general, we roast for filter or espresso.

Filter coffee creates a very clean aromatic experience

where it's like very much focused on terroir of the coffee.

If you brew a French press or an arrow press,

that's actually a different brew method.

The water and the coffee is soaking together.

Whereas in a filter,

the water just passes through the coffee.

So even though you're kind of ended up

with something almost similar,

it's actually two different brew methods.

Then you have espresso where it's more focused on,

on the sweetness.

And it's another sensation where it's like

more intense aroma and it's like a small thing,

but it lingers for longer.

I think there's some essentials when you are to brew

a good cup of coffee.

Water is where we kind of extract the flavors.

So a good water and a good grinder.

That is the most basic thing.

If you have that,

you can brew amazing coffee on any coffee brewer.

(birds chirping)

For a coffee to be sustainable,

it has to be sustainable for everyone.

The roaster, the buyer, the farmer, the farm worker,

for all the people involved in the supply chain.

Coffee workers are very low paid

Here in Panama and we have a very strong economy.

We have the strongest economy in Central America.

We have an agricultural minimum wage

for our coffee worker of $11.30 a day.

We pay our workers substantially more than that.

You can't live on $11.30 a day,

and then can't have any kind of quality of life.

You can't support a family.

You can't have proper nutrition or pay for any of the things

that most of us assume come with quality of life.

To make it worse,

most of the farms are paying their employees

between seven and $8 a day,

they're not even making the minimum wage.

In parts of the rest of the world,

salaries much, much lower.

And my contention in the whole thing here

is that it doesn't need to be this way, okay?

Enormous amounts of money are being made

at the point of consumption.

And very little of that is coming back down to origin.

And I think it's a broken industry,

an industry in need of major, major correction.

When you're a coffee grower,

the two ways to be in business,

whether you can be a quality seller,

which means you're probably going to be exploiting

the coffee or a quantity seller.

Much, much, more profitable to be a quality seller,

but much more difficult also.

When you're a farm owner,

you incur your major expenses

in the months during the harvest.

So December, January, February, maybe even into March,

nearly 60% of the cost of growing coffee is involved

in paying the pickers to pick the cherries.

But then when you send the coffee out for export,

you won't receive your money until maybe November,

or if you're lucky December.

So you're talking about 10 or 12 month period

of cashflow strain.

I'm very, very lucky.

I mean, I know how lucky I am.

I can withstand that.

But most of the people it's very much

of a hand to mouth industry.

You pick the cherries, you sell them

so that you can put food on the table.

Everything is changing from year to year,

the market price have been down to around $1 a pound.

You can't even produce coffee at that cost.

We want to create coffee experiences that excites us,

but also where we get to pay better prices to farmers.

The way we do it, it's always based on the quality.

So we don't wanna do any charity, it's not about that.

It's about buying from people that do amazing work,

and we know if we want the best quality,

we need to invest in the coffee.

So we need to pay a price that's fair for the product.

It's easy to say we pay well, but is that to an importer?

Is it directly to the farm?

I'd rather be talking about the traceability?

How transparent are companies really willing to be?

I think that's the way we were heading.

We do trade as direct as possible.

Sometimes it's with the farm,

sometimes would have corporate.

It's been about making sure we do certain things.

We pay them minimum above the market price.

We visit the producers so we build on the relationship.

We work with people in some pretty poor areas.

So it's all about enhancing

the living conditions first and foremost.

Okay, they're using it for shade?

They're using it of shade.

Food and coffee together grow.

Yes.

That's great, sounds good, yeah.

Inter cropping, yeah.

Better housing, better food, better education.

And then of course, some invest in better equipment.

How can they produce even better quality

so they can get even higher prices?

It's a beautiful thing to be a part of.

It's a bigger washing station compared to (indistinct).

This one?

Yeah.

We work with many different countries now.

In some countries we work in corporates,

some other we work with small private farms

and some, we work with bigger private farms.

(birds chirping)

Akmel has his own farm.

I tried to go twice a year and we've been working many years

to get the quality up.

The big luck we buy, we pay $3.70 per pound direct to Akmel.

For the special things that we work on,

we pay everything from four and a half dollars up to

$7 per pound.

It's fair for me, It's good for them.

Getting this price means you are going to have enough money

to financially support your employee

and then to make better your farm.

(African upbeat music)

When you work, you're not working for yourself only,

you work for the country, you work for your family,

you work for the community.

Really is good.

It makes you happy inside of you.

I support community school.

Sometimes I go to give them a lecture

because education is powerful.

By being educated and you can have lots of opportunities.

So please come to school and then be a good student.

And then I help a school always every year financially.

Build classes and then buy equipment

to support the equipment.

I bought last year, a computer for the school.

It means a lot for them

because kids they never sort of compete with other school.

This is a very remote area.

Thank you very much.

This year, they gave me award.

That award is what I did for the community

for the last few years.

And then they really, very, thankful.

They said, really they appreciate what I did for the school.

And then I said, no problem.

We work together and then whatever I can,

I will help the school.

(soothing music)

Everybody's talking about sustainable this,

sustainable that you even hear politicians

talk about something being sustainable or not sustainable.

But from its initial use from environmentalist

and ecologist at first just has meant one of,

sort of ecological sustainability.

Something that can be in place for an indefinite

amount of time and be sustained

kind of year after year after year.

But I think also the it's more than that,

it has to be socially sustainable, all right?

People have to be involved with it

and have to be able to exist with it

and gained from it year after year,

and it has to be economically, of course,

I think a lot of companies,

when they talk about sustainability,

they're only talking about the economic sustainability

of whatever it is they're addressing,

but I think you have those three where you have

environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

And that then means it can,

you know be in place for a very long time

and continue to exist in whatever form it has.

If we valued the ecosystem services

that were produced on shade coffee farms,

and that's not just saving the birds,

it's protecting the watershed.

It's creating lumber, it's sequestering carbon,

it's saving pollinators.

We need to do all of those things.

None of which is happening in sun coffee,

then it would, the economics would be very obvious.

The trouble is we don't value those things

and we value them, but we're not willing to pay for them.

If there was actually monetary values associated with that,

this would be a no-brainer.

Everybody would be doing shade coffee.

So shade is really important for coffee

for a number of reasons.

So for one reason,

we have a situation of climate change now

that is creating warming conditions

around the world obviously, and also locally.

And so shade is really good to create a micro climate,

so that really helps us.

Shade also really helps to generate nutrient recycling.

So the trees will drop leaves that will mulch into the soil

and provide a certain level of fertilization and nutrients

to the coffee plants themselves.

That's all really good for the coffee.

Coffee doesn't need tons of rain,

but it does need a good level of humidity

that stays in the soil.

The trees defoliate at the end of the harvest season,

just as the dry seasons beginning.

And that's an incredible thing

because basically this blanket of leaves

then covers the soil, when the soil needs it the most.

All around, shade is just a great companion to coffee.

Here at Gaia, we have over 70 species of trees.

It is really a lot like a forest in that sense,

if you walk around this farm,

you're gonna see tons of butterflies.

You're gonna see tons of insects.

We're really proud of the sanctuary

that it provides for birds and all kinds of wildlife.

We have iguana, we have armadillo,

we have rabbits, we have deer.

We have all kinds of wildlife here

and it's just really great to see this haven for wildlife

on a farm.

I love really nature.

And then I love wild animals also.

There's a sign, don't cut the trees and a no shot.

Don't kill animals.

I don't want animals to go away.

I don't want forest to go away.

I want coffee with the forest to be alive together

and then animals to be together there.

So in the middle of my coffee land,

I left about 21 hectares, untouched forest.

It cannot work inside because it's deep forest.

Sometimes when you see animals, they run away.

You know where they run away, in that deep forest.

So which means they have a place where to stay.

Yeah, you cannot follow them.

You cannot get them.

You just hey, I'm at home, goodbye.

(Akmel laughs)

Well, coffee is just for a monkeys

is belonged for nature.

We didn't plant it so it's not ours.

We have a lot of very interesting animals.

They're monkeys and then wild pigs, and hyena,

a lion, and a deer.

A lot of birders.

Well, the birds that make use of coffee farms,

they're not there necessarily for the coffee.

They're there for the shade trees

that are protecting the coffee.

The birds will come to a shade coffee farm,

especially if there is a diversity of shade trees,

they're flowers that are providing nectar

for certain birds.

They're plants that are attracting insects for other birds

that make use of insects.

There places for birds to hang out because they feel safe

because it's dense vegetation.

There, lots of trunks and limbs

that certain birds like to run around on.

And you know, birds do different things

depending on what species they are.

So all of that structural diversity

then provides what ecologists called different niches

for birds to make a living.

And so the more niches you have,

the more bird species you can support.

(birds chirping)

42 out of our 54 species of warblers

in North America come down to coffee farms.

That's by far, most of them are orioles, swallows,

vireos, buntings, what else?

Fly catchers, they're all coming south.

And many, many of those are attempting

to spend the winter in what is now coffee farms.

They're coming to where they always came.

But if it's recently been converted to a coffee farm,

that's what they have.

In the past,

people thought that the shade trees will support wildlife

simply because they're trees and they're providing shade.

Nobody was thinking very much about the food

that they provide.

People don't like insects.

They don't realize though that they're the primary component

of terrestrial food webs.

It's the insect that is eating the plant

and then transferring the energy to birds and reptiles

and mammals and all kinds of other things.

As if we lost our insects,

we would lose most of the biological diversity

on this planet.

But you don't have the insects

if you don't have the right plants that support them.

So the more trees we have in this coffee farms, the better,

but the more productive those trees are,

the better for the birds.

Birds are ecological indicators

that tell us how our ecosystems are doing.

We have 50% fewer songbirds today

than we had just 40 years ago.

So that tells us there's something very wrong

with the ecosystem supporting these birds.

And those are the same ecosystem supporting us.

And we don't wanna wait until those systems collapse

to try to do something about it.

We've got to do it proactively.

Well, there used to be an ad, which said,

if you wink it a pretty girl in the dark,

no one knows that you're doing it.

You need to advertise.

So I guess it's kind of like that.

If you are doing all this work,

you need something which says I am doing it

and I can tell people that I am doing it.

And I've been certified now since 2002.

Everything that we produce is organic.

And I'm not saying that everybody has to go organic,

but they need to go sustainable.

And conventional production is not sustainable.

I don't think that you can feel

that you have custody over a piece of land

that you can abuse.

And to me, putting in massive pesticides and fertilizers,

which break down the soil is a form of abuse.

So I had to find a way of working with the soil,

with the farm, with the plants that were there.

And the process was organic.

What the certification does is to make sure

that people know that you are doing

what you say you're doing.

We need to remember that third parties need

to exist to ensure the consumer,

that what the label says they're getting

is what they're getting.

So consumers cannot just trust a company

and their social mission based on what they say

that they are offering.

Because companies can offer

all kinds of marketing approaches,

but you're just trusting their word.

And while there are companies with many good intentions,

it's a third party certification that comes in

and really looks at a number of criteria and says,

okay, you're meeting the criteria or you're not.

Bird friendly coffee refers to coffee

that is certified as being good for birds.

Now the first criterion for us is that

the coffee needs to be certified organic.

Just because there's way too much scientific literature

on the impact of agrochemicals on wildlife.

If a farm is certified organic,

and then the management of the shade meets some criteria

we created, then it can be bird friendly.

Now, the criteria that we created

came directly out of field research,

done by colleagues that I have at the Migratory Bird Center,

where it was determined that the height of the trees

is an important factor.

The species diversity of the trees that are providing shade

is an important factor.

The overall foliage cover that is being provided

is an important variable as well.

And the structure is also important.

Well, sun dried coffee

does not have canopy trees.

It's fully exposed to the sun.

So if there are no trees,

there's no place for birds to forage

and then you're certainly not producing the insects

they wanna forage on.

So it's a very harsh environment for birds.

Coffee is grown in the most biologically diverse regions

of the world.

So this is a perfect opportunity.

It's really a profound conservation opportunity

to use shade trees properly.

We have the option of growing the coffee

and saving it for something else at the same time.

So we're not talking about giving up the agriculture.

This is just one of the unique opportunities

to do both at the same time.

It was amazing to see how after two years

for being bird friendly and organic,

with us seeing so many birds and new life in differ.

I love birds.

I love trees.

I love everything,

but I thought I have to prove that this is true.

That's the reason why there is a need

to have the certifications.

The certification is needed so the consumer

knows that I'm not selling something that is not true.

So what bird friendly coffee is,

is it's coffee that you know comes from

a place that's good for migratory birds,

it's good for local biodiversity.

It's good for family farmers and their children

and their workers and it's good for the earth we all share.

And it's also great tasting coffee.

Bird friendly,

I think is the gold standard of environmental coffee.

It is the gold standard in the sense that

it is rewarding farmers for doing the right thing.

There's no use of agrochemicals,

no pesticides, no herbicides.

And that has a positive effect on birds

and it has a positive effect on all the biodiversity

on the farm and the workers.

I don't wanna get too rigid

and to say that the only approach to sustainable production

is organic and shade grown at the same time,

I do think it's the gold standard.

(soothing music)

(birds chirping)

We have 132 species of birds that we've observed

on the farm.

That's a sign that the ecosystem is healthy

and that we're doing something right

to nurture that ecosystem.

We're not damaging.

The whole idea is that we can help to enhance

the health of the ecosystem and make a livelihood.

We need to plant for the future

and grow for the future.

So that's what sustainability is.

It's looking down that road and saying,

if I do this, this soil is going to be healthy.

These trees are going to be healthy.

We're going to be able to keep producing on this land.

I think consumers

should get more involved in the process,

and the not only consume, consume, consume,

but understand what they're putting inside their bodies.

You know what they're buying,

knowing where their product comes from, how it was produced.

All the people that are involved in the process.

I think people should ask that to the store

or wherever they get the coffee.

They ask about what's happening on the farm,

where this coffee is being grown?

What are the soil conditions?

What are the shade conditions?

What are the worker's conditions?

You can demand a higher quality product with your dollars.

You're spending a lot of money for it.

I mean you really are the idea that you can spend $5,

five Euro for a cup of coffee.

And the guy who grows is making $5 all day,

we can do better as an industry.

There will always be coffee, okay.

There will always be coffee.

The question is whether there will always be

wonderful (indistinct) coffee?

I think there will be,

but who's gonna produce it?

How's it gonna be produced?

Will it be ethically produced?

That's the big question.

There have to be market incentives

for sustainable production of coffee.

And until that happens,

then farmers will be responding to signals

that will them to make a living.

And we just have to get those market signals, right?

I think responsible consumers, educated consumers,

consumers that really care about the environment

and know more about things like organic

and bird friendly coffee,

can really begin to make a difference.

If the people buy and drink coffee,

want coffee to be produced in a sustainable way, it will be.

If they don't, it won't be.

That's it.

I believe in the market system that way.

So it's up to the end user

to say, no, we want Fairtrade Coffee,

No, we want Organic Coffee.

No, we want Bird Friendly Coffee.

And if they vote with their pocketbooks,

there'll be some movement.

You can do a lot of good just by drinking coffee.

It's a great way to feel good.

It's a great way to start the day.

Buy that shade coffee is one,

but think about your daily life

and how, what you do impacts the things around you.

Very simple changes often can make a huge difference.

We've had this idea that humans are here

and nature is someplace else.

And that worked for a long time

because there weren't very many humans

and there was a lot of nature.

Now there's a lot of humans and very little nature,

not enough nature to support all those humans.

So we now have to have nature again in our yards,

where we farm, in our cities, where we play,

we have to share all of our spaces with other species.

And that's fun.

We're not talking about a sacrifice here.

To the degree possible,

more consumers they need to look at the value

of shade grown coffee.

Look for it, prioritize it, buy it wherever they can.

It might cost just a tad bit more,

but it really is worth it,

for the farmers, for the landscape, for the planet.

(soothing music)