Essay by Eric Worrall
Our heroic coffee explorers trekking through remote African wilderness, searching for species which can withstand global warming.
To survive climate change, coffee must embrace new and resilient beans
By Marissa Garcia
June 9, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDTThe research team’s task was as lofty as the mountains they scaled in December 2018. Their mission? To find a coffee species not seen for nearly 70 years in Sierra Leone.
The species, though lost to the wild, lived on in textbooks. Daniel Sarmu, a local researcher on the team, had searched from “field to field” for four years. If any peculiar plant caught his eye, he’d collect a sample, hoping it’d be the lost species. But each genetic test came back negative; the search carried onward.
Until the expedition in 2018, when researchers found one plant of Coffea stenophylla in the largely deforested Kasewe Hills.
The moment was bittersweet. To regrow the elusive species, they needed to cross this plant with another — but a second stenophylla plant was not in sight. A few days later, they ventured to Kambui Hills. After just an hour of hiking — a drop in the bucket compared with Sarmu’s four-year search — they uncovered 20 plants. At all life stages, stenophylla was flourishing: seedlings, saplings and trees.
“Then, we knew we had something to build upon in terms of rescuing the species,” recalls Jeremy Haggar, a researcher on the team and a professor of agroecology at the University of Greenwich.
…
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/06/09/climate-change-coffee-stenophylla-arabica-robusta/
Let us hope our intrepid explorers discover their magic beans.
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even more daft when the biggest ruination of coffee crops for the last 2 or 3 seasons is
FROST
The FAOSTAT website only provides data from 1961, but this includes the roughly 1°C rise observed in GMST since the mid-1970s … which is a full half of the “dangerous” +2°C “global warming” that will [ definitely, absolutely, 100% guaranteed certain … because the climate models say so … ] wreak havoc on mankind in the near future.
As the graph below “clearly” demonstrates, this +1°C of warming has a definite negative correlation with the FAO’s official “World : Coffee, green” production numbers, and has already resulted in an absolutely devastating drop in production …
… Oh ! … Wait …
This as I enjoy my 2nd cup of freshly brewed Tim Hortons. I don’t think I could be a truck driver without coffee!
Nonsense. Unusual cold hurt the coffee market most recently.
Its time these “journalist” (propagandist) start getting outed for lying.
PS. Don’t start dreaming of growing coffee in VT just yet.
Am I the only one that had to look up and watch this episode of South Park?