Agriculture and Environment: Coffee

Better Management Practices: Reduce Soil Erosion

It has taken considerable time and a lot of mistakes to identify and analyse better management practices for managing soils in coffee plantations, especially with all of the cultural and geographical variations.

In the early years of coffee production in Brazil, for example, people established plantations by planting rows of coffee trees perpendicularly up hillsides.

This practice guaranteed severe erosion. It is now clear, for example, that planting on contours around hills and spacing the trees so that they are staggered up hillsides reduces erosion tremendously.

Incentives to adopt BMPs
The Brazilian government tied coffee-planting loans to such improved practices and noticed an immediate reduction of soil erosion.

For example, a comparison of perpendicular and contour planting on steep slopes showed a reduction in soil losses from 4.4-3.1 metric tons per hectare in only a few years. Furthermore, contour planting reduced runoff by 25%, thus retaining more water for the crop.

Effective use of contour strips
Contour strips (alternating bands of trees with bands of other vegetation) were also found to provide erosion control, but the most effective practice to reduce erosion was to plant grass between the bushes. This practice was found to reduce soil losses to 0.2 metric tons per hectare and rainfall runoff by 90% (May et al. 1993).