Coffee is meant to be grown naturally in the shade of the rainforest canopy.  Coffee producers found that by cutting down the rainforest cover and letting the crops grow in full sun, they get more yield from the crop.  Since this wasn’t the natural habitat of the coffee plant, more fertilizers and pesticides were required to grow the coffee on what is commonly known as a “sun plantation”.  All of the major brands of coffee that are sold are grown on these sun plantations.

Cuba, curiously enough, is now the world’s foremost coffee producer due to the US trade embargo.  Being unable to purchase any of the chemicals that you need to make a sun plantation work, Cuban coffee producers cultivated the plants naturally by old-fashioned means.  Cuban coffee has been lauded as the world’s best, right alongside organic kona coffee.

You’ll also hear the term “bird-friendly” when you are looking at organic coffee. This term refers to the fact that the natural rainforest canopy is necessary to sustain several bird species.  When the canopy is removed for sun plantations, those species will die off.

Here are a few places that you can buy organic coffee online; bear in mind you can also buy it at Whole Foods and local health food stores:

– Jim’s Organic Coffee
– Shore Coffee (Cuban Coffee, ships to Canada only)

Here’s a great video about organic coffee farming.  Not the highest production value but it gets a few key points across, including how much money they make off of an organic coffee farm:

Tags: organic coffee, organic coffee beans, organic kona coffee

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