Tag Archives: water

Calculating Water Benefits on Coffee Farms

2016-06-23 Paul Hicks Comments Off

This a guest post by Will Garde, from the Caffeinated Engineer, who has provided technical support to CRS’ Blue Harvest program this past year. Knowledge-based Coffee Watershed Management We know a lot about sustainable agricultural practices, and the specialty coffee industry has been a pioneer in incentivizing farmers to adapt good practices. But these practices, require time […]

Preview to SCAA Expo Panel on Water in the Coffeelands

2016-04-11 Paul Hicks Comments Off

Coffee and the Global Water Crisis This post provides a summary of SCAA’s forthcoming policy brief on Water Security in the Coffeelands, to be published in mid-2016. As a prelude to this publication, the SCAA Sustainability Council has organized a panel called “Water in the Coffeelands: How Coffee Can Make Water Cleaner and Landscapes Greener” at the SCAA Expo in Atlanta (9am, Friday, April […]

Coffee’s Water Footprint Needs to Be Revised

2016-04-01 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

Natural Coffees – good for water resources

2016-03-08 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

CRS Coffeelands Blog Year in Review

2016-01-19 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Today, the annual review of the Coffeelands content you liked best over the past year. .

Green Water, in Practice

2015-11-26 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

Integral Ecology

2015-11-12 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

Manage Soils to Manage Water

2015-11-05 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

Praised Be Water

2015-10-22 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]

Blue Harvest and Coffeelands

2015-10-09 Paul Hicks Comments Off

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 […]