It starts with a seed
A new class of coffee varieties is giving coffee growers and scientists hope for the future.
From Standart Magazine Issue 12:
"Between now and 2050, nearly every coffee tree on the planet will be replaced. Some new trees will be planted where none exist now, and some will be torn out and replanted with something else. Some farmers’ children will take over their parents' farms; many will not. It’s staggering to think of the scale of change that will be experienced in the places where coffee now grows. But if all those billions of trees can’t thrive, and if the farmers tending to those trees can’t thrive, we won’t have coffee at all. All of it, everything that we love about coffee, depends on the plant and the farmer succeeding. At the same time, it’s thrilling to imagine all the innovations that will undoubtedly happen between now and then. We are just beginning to glimpse the transformational power of one such innovation—a new class of varieties called F1 hybrids. As with anything genuinely new, the potential of F1 hybrids is hard to understand.
Currently, only a few thousand hectares of land in the world are planted in F1 hybrid varieties. But by 2050, these varieties could make up a majority of all the area cultivated in Arabica coffee.1The advantages they offer coffee producers and coffee drinkers can’t be overstated. They are the single most exciting innovation in coffee in the last decade, but very few people know what they are or why they matter so much ..."
Many thanks to Standart Magazine for allowing us to share the full text of this article with our readers.