The Measure of Coffee’s Water Footprint Needs to Be Revised This 2003 study on coffee’s water footprint reported that it requires 140 liters of water to produce one cup of coffee. This metric is quoted so frequently (including by this blog) that it’s almost assumed to be a fact. However, the study needs a critical review because it is […]
Six years ago, James Hoffman started a post on natural coffees saying, “You could say this debate is old news, but somehow it still seems to be rumbling on.” Well, I’m fairly new to specialty coffee, and I’m so green to natural coffees that I was surprised (and delighted) to discover there was a debate. After studying […]
Happy New Year amigos! We hope wherever you are, you are enjoying this New Year with good people. May you discover and cultivate peace and wisdom in 2016. Coffeelands Playlist For all of you who follow and participate in Coffeelands, here is a playlist we created on Spotify. Each song has some reference to coffee. […]
A few years ago, I asked a farmer in the “dry corridor” of eastern El Salvador what he would do to improve water management if he were the donor funding our project. He pointed up at the hills and said, “During the wet season, there are torrents of rain that come down this mountain. The vast […]
I introduced Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, in an earlier post. For this second (and last) post on the letter, I’m pasting sections from the chapter called Integral Ecology. What’s this have to do with coffee and water? Everything. Coffee and water are part of an integrated social and natural system, where the interaction […]
This week I’m at a water conference #uncwaterandhealth at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) with about 700 incredibly bright folk, all trying to work out how to manage water better. Great place to learn. Despite all the great ideas here, I am surprised about how few water professionals and researchers connect the challenge of ensuring […]
In this blog, we write little about our Catholic identity – but behind what we do is a set of principles, based on faith and sense of mission. In this post, I would like to highlight a source of these principles. In May, Pope Francis published Laudato Si (Praised Be), his encyclical on the environment. This treatise is […]
Last week, we announced CRS’ new global coffee program, Coffeelands. In that post, we said that Coffeelands will build the CRS Blue Harvest approach into future programs in the coffeelands. Today, we want to provide you a glimpse of what this means. Background on Blue Harvest Blue Harvest has been highlighted several times in this blog, starting with […]
The Sustainable Development Goal for Water This weekend, the UN will launch the new Sustainable Development Goals. These goals build from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were a driver for the world’s development priorities from 1990-2015. MDG #7 focused on the environment with a sub-target devoted to water, including a target to “halve, by 2015, the […]
Blessed is the Machete A machete makes a wonderful wedding gift. After working many years with farmers around the world, I learned to value the multiple functions a machete offers a family: it’s a knife, a lawn mower, vegetable peeler, screwdriver, tree pruner, and so much more. A few years ago, my friends Sara and […]
