Besides helping family farms, choosing shade-grown coffee ensures the survival of those songbirds in your backyard.
Coffee is a shade-loving shrub that thrives under a canopy of diverse trees.
But Americans' love of coffee has encouraged coffee plantations to industrialize production, growing coffee in huge fields under open sun and requiring heavy doses of chemicals. This is bad news for birds, whose numbers have been declining across North America as sun coffee farms have increased in popularity. EMS has fact sheets on shade-grown coffee, migratory birds and sun vs. shade growing. We also have a list of experts on the subject, from Smithsonian scientists to coffee companies. Traditional, shade coffee farms resemble forests.