Agriculture and Environment: Coffee

Environmental Impacts of Production: Soil Degradation

Historically coffee production in places such as Brazil has been characterised by a frontier, throwaway mentality.

Coffee production has tended to migrate across the landscape, as plantations are abandoned and new ones started on fresh soil.

Rendering productive areas useless
Such migration left behind lands that were suitable first for short-term agriculture, then for extensive cattle grazing, and finally were often abandoned once soil degradation and erosion left them unproductive.

In some instances, extensive use of fertilisers and other agrochemicals allowed such lands to continue to be used, but with their own particular set of environmental impacts.

Harm done by "clean" fields
One of the most degrading forms of coffee cultivation for soils is the use of herbicides to produce "clean" fields free of other vegetation.

The use of herbicides to produce weed-free fields (or rather fields free of any other vegetation except coffee) on the slopes of coffee farms, particularly those at high elevations, is one of the major causes of soil exposure and erosion.

Low, creeping cover crops such as the legume Arachis pintoi can be used to maintain ground cover and reduce soil erosion and exposure of the soil to sun, wind, and rain.