If agroforestry is so great, why isn't all coffee grown like this ❓
👉🏼 Uncertainty
For farmers land is business, so the focus is usually to generate the biggest profit. Monocultures are usually the best strategy to maximise profit.
👉🏼 Complexity
Managing trees, shrubs, and crops together demands new skills and a deeper understanding of plant interactions, requiring more expertise to manage.
👉🏼 Less developed markets
In a landscape dominated by coffee monocultures, your coffee buyer will pick your coffee up from your farm door and transfer money to your account for it. For other products of your agroforest you need to find buyers and probably also deliver your products to them. More risk, more hassle.
👉🏼 Lack of support
There are various state and private support programmes for monocultures but for agroforestry there are none, at least in the area where we are working. Not just that, but there are even bureacratic hurdles, such as the requirement to register any native tree you plant with the state forestry commission (Instituto Estadual Florestal). You don’t have to do this if you’re planting non-native trees.
💡Our Impact
We focus on agroforestry with diverse native trees to grow nature positive coffee that supports coffee farmers in the face of climate change challenges.
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