Even
the most dedicated locavores allow for certain exemptions to the
however-many-miles diet they’ve committed to eating. For most people
living in the continental United States, finding sugar made from locally
grown cane is an impossibility. Same goes for coffee and tea. Even
if all of your fruits, vegetables, meat, and grains are grown right next
door, your morning (and midafternoon) caffeine fix likely was grown
abroad.
Save for the Kona coffee grown in Hawaii, the U.S. imports all its
coffee. The plants are native to Africa, in and around Ethiopia, but
coffee farming is spread across the global south. Brazil leads world production in green coffee, followed by Vietnam, Indonesia, and Colombia, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Arabica coffee, preferred by high-end coffee roasters, is grown mostly in Latin America and eastern Africa. Robusta coffee, considered lower quality and used largely in instant blends, is largely grown in Vietnam, Brazil, Indonesia, and India.
It’s an agricultural reality that undercuts all of the marketing for
“locally roasted” coffee. But a specialty farmer in Santa Barbara,
California, is trying to change that status quo by proving that coffee
can be successfully grown in the continental U.S., not just in the
tropics. Jay Ruskey owns Good Land Organics, where he grows cherimoyas, dragon fruit, avocados, caviar limes—and coffee.
It all began when specialty crops adviser Mark Gaskell with the
University of California’s division of agriculture and natural resources
approached Ruskey in 2001 with the idea of growing coffee. They started
experimenting with the crop, and not always with great success.
One of the chief problems for California coffee is water. Most of the
coffee grown in the world is dry farmed, relying mainly on tropical
rains, more than 100 inches a year, to grow. Santa Barbara gets an
average of about 20 inches a year—and that’s when the state isn’t in a four-year drought.
Ruskey stuck with coffee, working with Gaskell on different ways to
grow it, until they had a eureka moment: Plant the shrubs right next to
the avocado trees on the farm, so the coffee benefits from the trees’
shade and uses the same irrigation and other inputs. Not only is Ruskey
growing the only commercial coffee crop in the country, but he’s doing
it without using any additional land, water, or fertilizer.
Coffee plants growing beneath avocado trees outside Santa Barbara.
“I went through lots of cycles of plantings and looked at options for
using unused land,” he said. “Interplanting works for a lot of reasons,
and coffee fits perfectly with avocados because it has similar
nutrition requirements.”
The symbiotic relationship between coffee and avocados may be new, but interplanting
has been successful over the ages for lots of other plants, such as
sun-worshiping tomatoes and shade-loving lettuce, deep-rooted carrots
and subsurface beets, and hungry corn and soil-enhancing beans.
“My job is to help small farms with problem solving, so I’m always
looking for these kinds of synergies,” Gaskell said of the interplanting
technique. “Commercial water rates are high, so ‘How are we going to
get the most efficient utilization of land and water?’ is at the back of
every grower’s mind.”
Which is why Ruskey is excited not only by the prospect of coffee,
but also about mixing crops in general; he’s planning to try a variety
of combinations to find other synergies and ways of conserving water and
other resources.
He also sells coffee-plant starters
to other avocado farmers and travels to farm conferences to talk up the
potential of interplanting coffee, all in the hopes of increasing the
amount of coffee grown in the state and to establish a premium brand.
Once he gained experience and arrived at interplanting as the best
option, things began to take off. When Ruskey finally had a sizable
harvest, he began by selling the coffee at farmers markets. As his
harvest grew, he began getting inquiries from specialty buyers, who
would pay upwards of $60 a pound.
Good Land Organics is selling several hundred pounds of green and
roasted beans harvested from its 2,200 plants to clients in the U.S.,
Europe, and Japan. It’s small-scale when compared with the major coffee
producers in the world, but Coffee Review rated Ruskey’s coffee
among the top 30 in the world in 2014, putting his beans on the
international coffee map. That’s when he knew the experiment was
working.
“Our coffee cherries are on the plant longer than almost anywhere in
the world, so that gives us that flavor,” Ruskey said. “In the tropics,
they slow down the coffee bean growth by planting them in shade or in
higher elevations, where it’s cooler. We are able to do this easily
because of our cooler climate here.” He offers coffee tours on his farm
to show people that it’s not a gimmick but reality. Coffee Review’s top ranking of Good Land Organics’ beans has
made coffee associations elsewhere sit up and take notice of the
potential for a high-quality, domestic crop. “All of a sudden I’m thrown
into the spotlight of the coffee world because I’m a disruption, which
is something it needs, because it does not have a lot of research going
on, like with other crops,” Ruskey said.
But despite all the growing hype, Ruskey insists he is still just a small farmer: “Fame is not fortune.”
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