Category: Resilience

Innovative Models at Origin: A Territorial Approach to Communal Land Management and Income Diversification

Coffee farmers across origin countries search for and develop innovative business, production and management models as they seek out profitable and sustainable livelihood strategies. These interesting and diverse “solutions in process” enjoy varying degrees of success. Sistema Comunitario para el Resguardo y Manejo de la Biodiversidad (SICOBI), whose model is a blend of territorial management, […]

Extreme Price Volatility Undermines the Coffee Sector

In a recent post, I wrote that the C-Price for coffee is flawed and there is an urgent need for viable solutions to improve the coffee market. The post was picked up by Daily Coffee News and got a lot of attention – both positive and negative, which is well appreciated. The goal of the original post […]

Win-win: Blue Harvest providing solutions that help cooperatives get back on their feet while PROTECTING WATER

In Blue Harvest, we have been working on improving water use efficiency and waste water treatment in wet mills, protecting water recharge areas in the farms by applying soil and water conservation practices (here and here) with a focus on regenerative coffee , as well as working with water system operators and water committees to […]

THE TIME TO REGENERATE COFFEE IS NOW, AND IT STARTS WITH HEALTHY SOIL

2018-04-20 Comments

  It is time to move beyond the idea of sustainable coffee. Sustaining something assumes that what we have is already good enough. Yet numerous studies have shown that if the coffee industry does not change its current “business-as-usual” approach, we will not have quality coffee in the future. And this will hurt everyone that […]

Measuring ROI of farm management activities on water resources in the Coffeelands

Measuring how better management of coffee farms improve water resources in the Coffeelands Blue Harvest started as an idea of how to restore and improve the management of water resources in coffee producing areas in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, while increasing the productivity of coffee farms located in our target watersheds.  As we have […]

ROYA IS EVOLVING. SO WHAT NOW?

World Coffee Research has spoken.  Lempira, a high-yielding, popular variety planted throughout Honduras is no longer what thousands of farmers hoped that it would be: resistant to coffee leaf rust.  While there is not yet any conclusive scientific evidence that la roya has evolved into a new race or strain, all indications are pointing to […]

COFFEE LEAF RUST REARS ITS UGLY HEAD AGAIN

Right in the build up to the SCA, there popped up a bit of news out of Honduras that caught my attention.  Like the villain in the in a cheesy horror movie, coffee leaf rust, better known as la roya, just won’t go away.   Initial reports in late March said that there was an outbreak […]

Zen and the Art of Natural Coffee

2017-02-22 1 Comment

Last year, I waded into the debate on natural coffee with a post called “Natural Coffees – Good for Water Resources” concluding that, “I think that natural coffees should have a future, and that the coffee industry (from roasters to farmers) should invest in methods and systems to make natural coffees more consistent”. After that […]

Beyond the Source – the co-benefits of water-smart farm practices

Last August (time is flying) we posted a summary of the Specialty Coffee Association’s Blueprint for Water Security in the Coffeelands. That paper presented 6 recommendations “to support action by coffee stakeholders committed to increasing water security at origin”. I want to highlight one of the key SCA recommendations, and how it links to an exciting new […]

It’s all about CEC, You See

This is a guest post by Hannah Francis, a Fulbright Scholar working with CRS’ Blue Harvest team in El Salvador this year. Hannah is a soil scientist helping analyze research data from hundreds of coffee farms. This post builds on our recent post called Get Me SOM, and several other posts on soil management on coffee farms. Guest […]

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