Coffee is one of the most widely traded products on Earth, with organic and conventional coffee farmers around the world producing more than 12 billion pounds of coffee each year.
Of that amount, most is grown via “conventional” means, which usually indicates that a coffee farm uses farming techniques that maximizes production, often at the “expense of human and environmental health” because it relies on chemical fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
The best coffee often is organically grown coffee (although not always) and is almost
always more expensive than conventionally grown coffee because organic farmers tend to be smaller than conventional coffee farms (and therefore aren’t able to scale their farm in order to maximize production).
An important fact: organic farmers do use fertilizers, but they are organic fertilizers such as compost, chicken manure or coffee pulp (this also means organic coffee farms emit less carbon than chemical-using farms).
Coffee trees naturally prefer to grow in the shade, but many conventionally grown coffee beans are from coffee tree hybrids that have been designed to grow in the sun. Organic and non-organic coffee is grown predominately in the equatorial regions of the planet and many non-organic coffee farms are created by mowing down large forests so that farmers can plant hundreds or even thousands of the sun-loving coffee trees. Organic coffee trees are grown in leafy forests (plenty of the shade the coffee trees love), where it’s more difficult to plant, tend to and harvest the beans.
What’s more, because forests are leveled to plant sun-loving coffee trees, animals and other plants are demolished, meaning that natural pest fighters such as lizards and birds have no home, allowing coffee-ruining insects to take over, causing even more chemical pesticide use. And the cycle continues.
Breaking another myth: organic coffee isn’t always better quality than non-organic coffee. This is because coffee’s quality comes about due to many different factors such as the quality of the soil, the farm’s elevation, processing techniques, roasting process, and the freshness of the coffee used to brew your coffee, as well as the quality of the water.
Still, because non-organic coffee tends to be “factory farmed” on a much larger scale than organic coffee, its quality tends to be lower. But we’d be lying if we said organic always was a better quality coffee.
Ubean Coffee is premium, organically grown coffee. It’s very good coffee and it’s very expensive. It’s worth it!
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