A groundbreaking new study finds that coffee beans are bigger and more plentiful when birds and bees team up to protect and pollinate coffee plants.
Without these winged helpers, some traveling thousands of miles, coffee farmers would see a 25% drop in crop yields, a loss of roughly $1,066 per hectare of coffee.
That’s important for the $26 billion coffee industry—including consumers, farmers, and corporations who depend on nature’s unpaid labor for their morning buzz—but the research has even broader implications.
The forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to show, using real-world experiments at 30 coffee farms, that the contributions of nature—in this case, bee pollination and pest control by birds—are larger combined than their individual contributions.
Read more at University of Vermont
Image: The key characters in this love story? A bee (euglossa heterosticta), a coffee plant, and a bird (rufous capped warbler). Images courtesy of CATIE and John van Dort. Composite by Mary Kueser. (Credit: Images courtesy of CATIE and John van Dort. Composite by Mary Kueser)