A&M adds jolt to coffee research
Climate change, fungus threaten world’s supply
COLLEGE STATION — At the Starbucks inside Texas A&M University’s Evans Library, students line up for their daily jolt of java.
Across campus, in a rather ordinary laboratory inside the horticulture building, Fabian Echeverria is trying to prevent a worldwide coffee shortage.
Echeverria, a researcher from Costa Rica, is studying why certain coffee plants have genes making them somewhat tolerant to coffee leaf rust, a voracious fungus that has devastated crops in Central America and Brazil. Called “La Roya,” it is one of many serious threats now facing the coffee industry, which produces $170 billion in retail sales worldwide and employs more than 100 million people, many of them in economically depressed countries.
Climate change is intensifying many of those threats, including the coffee leaf rust. Compounding the problem is coffee’s lack of genetic diversity, the key to saving any species let alone one that is threatened by a fast-evolving
fungus.
“It’s like David and Goliath,” Echeverria said recently of leaf rust’s genetic advantage over coffee plants. “It’s a really unfair battle.”
Still, the battle to save coffee, the daily beverage choice of 130 million Americans, is one Texas A&M thinks it can help win.
The university is lending its considerable agricultural prowess to an international effort to make coffee a more sustainable, higher-yielding crop, mostly by improving its genetic diversity to make the plant more tolerant to pests, disease and warming temperatures.
In September, the A&M board of regents established the Center for Coffee Research and Education, to foster crucial genetic research, promote coffee education and assist the industry through the use of the college’s sensory science evaluation lab, which recently began taste testing coffee. It is one of three university centers dedicated to coffee research in the United States. The University of California at Davis and Vanderbilt University operate the other two.
Leo Lombardini, the center’s new executive director, said A&M is poised to make a significant scientific contribution to coffee research, which in the past has lagged work done on other globally important crops.
Adding to the sense of urgency, he said, is climate change. A 2015 study predicted 50 percent of the land used for production of Arabica coffee, the most valuable species of coffee plant, would be unsuitable by 2050.
“So what do we do?” Lombardini asked. “We cannot cool the planet. We cannot move the coffee farms. The alternative is to work on the actual coffee plant. We can make it more resistant to heat, and develop more varieties, more resistant varieties that can withstand stresses such as drought and heat.”
At first blush, A&M might not seem a likely place to be the epicenter of coffee research. The university, however, has two powerful allies: A&M’s world-renowned Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and the College Station-based World Coffee Research. That industry group is supported by coffee purveyors, including giants such as Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Keurig Green Moun- tain and J.M. Smucker Co., the company that owns Folgers and Dunkin Donuts.
“Coffee has suffered from a lack of advanced research in areas like genetics and disease resistance,” said Tim Schilling, World Coffee Research’s executive director. “With the creation of the new center (at Texas A&M), one of the world’s best agricultural research institutions is adding its might to the effort to solve key issues facing one of the world’s most important crops.” Can science save coffee?
The best coffee varieties are no match for today’s environmental problems, researchers say.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell, or more precisely, a coffee bean: more than 98 percent of Arabica coffee plants are genetically the same, making them incredibly susceptible to pests, disease and drought.
Because of its narrow genetic diversity, there are only 36 varieties of coffee. By contrast, there are more than 2,000 varieties of watermelon.
Most of the coffee we drink today originates from a few plants bred in Ethiopia and transported long ago to Yemen.
While Arabica plants have been successfully bred in many regions of the world, coffee producers essentially have been cut off from the genetically pure plants in Ethiopia due to exploitation concerns. In the 1960s, however, a few wild seeds were collected from Ethiopia by scientists and used to establish two collections that serve as a bank for genetic coffee plant material. One is in Columbia and the other in Costa Rica.
A2014 World Coffee Research study sampled 800 plants in the Costa Rican collection and discovered they are 98.8 percent genetically identical.
“It’s a problem,” Lombardini said. “We need to shake things up. We need to play with that 1.2 percent that allows us to bring back some of the genes. Ideally, we would go back to Ethiopia and get some of those and mix it together but we can’t do that.”
The A&M coffee research and education center is collaborating with a number of international scientists trying to identify the most genetically diverse set of coffee plants and breed them. Also, they are looking for Arabica and Robusta plants with highly desirable traits — drought and pest resistance being key — to breed those characteristics into a new plant.
“This kind of work, it’s long overdue,” Lombardini said. “Coffee is one of those orphan crops that have typically been grown in developing countries and processed in rich, wealthy countries. So there’s always been that disconnect.”
The Borlaug Institute wants to change that.
For decades, the institute has been working with farmers in developing countries. Before founding World Coffee Research in 2011, Schilling worked for Borlaug and helped Rwanda substantially increase
its coffee production, which helped the African nation recover from a devastating war.
World Coffee Research split from Borlaug earlier this year, allowing the nonprofit to concentrate on field work in 25 countries while A&M’s coffee research center focuses on laboratory science. The two continue to collaborate on a number of A&Mprojects such as Echeverria’s coffee leaf rust research and the university’s sensory lab coffee taste testing. ‘Difficult combination’
Hot coffee is good, but a hot planet is not good for coffee production.
Many coffee-growing countries already are experiencing the effects of climate change. Coffee leaf rust, for example, was once a problem only for warmer, lowland farms. But in recent years, it has affected farms at higher altitudes that are now experiencing hotter temperatures. Significant crop losses due to climate change are predicted for parts of India, Nicaragua and Brazil, all big coffee-producing countries.
“The trend the last 30 to 40 years show that temperatures are rising and with a crop that is so sensitive to temperature, even a temperature increase of one to two degrees Celsius can make a difference in growing Arabica (coffee) or not,” Lombardini said.
Bárbara Barbosa, a Brazilian native doing her postdoctoral work at A&M, is studying the gene expression of a variety of coffee known for being heat tolerant.
“Photosynthesis is food for them and respiration is how they burn their energy,” she said. “With higher temperatures at night, their respiration rates goes up. So you’re making energy, but you’re expending more, too. The yields are going to go down because the plant doesn’t have enough energy to produce flowers and fruits. It affects quality, too.”
Protecting the quality of coffee is tantamount to coffee research. For example, researcher Echeverria is not only trying to identify genes associated with rusttolerant plants, he’s also trying to pinpoint which ones influence how coffee tastes.
“You want everybody happy,” he said. “The farmer has to have a good plant so they will grow more coffee and that coffee has to taste good. It’s a difficult combination.” A better cup of joe
Over the past few months, Blythe Beavers has tasted more coffee than most people will drink in years.
Beavers, a graduate student at A&M, was in charge of training a group of College Station-area residents who have become taste testers for the uni- versity’s sensory lab. The lab’s coffee tasters slurp samples from a spoon and spit it out in a cup.
“It’s been a really interesting experience,” Beavers said. “Before, coffee was just coffee. I added cream and sugar. But you don’t realize how much variation can change flavor.”
The lab’s recent foray into coffee taste testing provides buyers and roasters valuable feedback on improving taste and smell. Its coffee testing was a direct result of the relationship between A&M and World Coffee Research.
The first step for the lab, which for years tested other foods, was the development of a dictionary of sorts to describe taste and smell of coffee. World Coffee Research commissioned food scientists at A&M and Kansas State University to develop the lexicon, which today consists of 110 words. Among them are: beany, pipe tobacco, olive oil, hay-like and peppery.
Typically, coffee tasters don’t slurp more than seven samples during a two-hour session.
“They can still sleep at night,” Lombardini said.