Caribou Coffee plans to be “the first U.S. coffee chain to commit to buying coffee grown only under sustainable farming practices developed by the Rainforest Alliance.” The Rainforest Alliance is a non-profit organization that works with farms to improve their crops and farming practices.
I hope they charge very little for certifying a farm. I can understand the cost for teaching farmers how to improve their work, but to merely put the Rainforest Alliance stamp of approval on a crop shouldn’t cost the farmer much, if anything. The farmers are barely making a living as it is, aren’t they? Why burden them to have their work approved by Americans?
This type of coffee growing,(Sustainable farming ), has developed into NO CUTTING TREES in the RAIN FOREST Farming! Nothing artificial at any point of the growth cycle can be used for any situation or purpose.
This entails the coffee plants somehow being grown above the canopy the trees. This allows the coffee plants to have virgin rain only. Nothing filters down from the canopy onto the coffee plants.
Along with this, only natural monkey and natural sloth poop can be used as fertilizers. Sloths rarely if ever get up to the canopies, let alone above them, (they can’t fly, you know…), so it is doubtful there will be enough fertilizers to go around….
No humans can be used to service or harvest the beans! The local Arkwalla monkeys will be trained to do this as humans would only mess up the environment.
This is all because, the usual coffee plants are planted where the rain forest has been cut down; for farming or logging reasons. Once cut down… apparently won’t grow back. So farmers come along and grow coffee for a few years until the soil is exhausted. They apparently don’t or can’t afford fertilizers so they move on to where other trees have been harvested,etc…etc… The beat goes on………..
Makes me proud to be a Pepsi drinker!!!