Where avocados grow, so may coffee
GOLETA, Calif. — There is a new crop growing in Southern California’s famous avocado groves — coffee.
About two dozen farms between San Diego and Santa Barbara are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in what may be the first serious effort in the United States to commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.
“When people hear I’m growing coffee, they typically make a face and say something like, ‘Well, how good can coffee grown in Californiabe ?’” said Jay R us key, the owner of Good Land Organics, who is widely regarded as the father of the state’ s na scent coffee business.
The farmers are hoping to capitalize on a variety of changing factors abroad and here, including the aging of California’s avocado trees, which are producing less fruit.
The avocado growers face major disruptions in their business, including increased competition from Mexican imports, less access to water and rising real estate prices, all of which are forcing them to rethink that crop. But thanks to Ruskey, they have realized that their sprawling avocado trees provide perfect shade for high-quality coffee bush es.
As growers like him consider the move into growing coffee beans, they are eyeing machinery that can harvest the beans, which would reduce labor costs, as well as a contraption called a demucilager that mechanically strips coffee berry skin and pulp off the beans, rather than using water to clean them.
And they see more and more U.S. consumers willing to spend $8 or $12 for a cup of joe, which would offset their high costs of production.
At the same time, climate change threatens to damage the coffee crop in the world’s tropical highlands that produce nearly all the world’s beans, potentially opening up a lucrative opportunity in the $20 billion export market for beans.
Ruskey has grown coffee on his farm for more than a decade, but it is only over the past three or four years, as his coffee started winning high scores in taste tests, that other farmers have begun to try their hands at growing it.
Doug Welsh, roast master at Pee t’ s, notes that the number of coffee bush es growing in California today is 30 times what it was 13 years ago when R us key started, or about 14,000 plants.
“We probably roast more coffee at Peet’s in one day than is being produced on all the farms growing coffee here, but I’m looking at this as a cup half full ,” Welsh said.