There are bigger issues. Right now, 'shade-grown' is the big one. This traditional form of coffee growing requires that coffee be planted beneath a canopy of native trees. Grown in the shade, coffee develops more slowly, creating a higher sugar content that, when the beans are roasted, gives the coffee a richer, fuller flavor. The trees fix nitrogen into the ground, resulting in fertile soil that requires little or no fertilizer or additional help.
Pesticides are unnecessary because of the birds that thrive in the shade-giving overstory.
Organic coffee, by definition, is almost guaranteed to have been shade-grown. The Fall of the Wild O VER THE LAST TWO decades, this canopy has been torn down as coffee growers convert to a process known as technification. Able to grow coffee three times faster than the traditional method, technification employs a hybrid plant that grows in full sunlight. In the absence of a leafy canopy there is consequently an absence of insect-eating birds, thus creating a need for insecticides to protect the ripening coffee bean crop. Of the 150 different species of birds that live on shade-grown coffee farms, many are migratory, wintering in southern climes before returning home to North America and Canada.