To provide tranparency of claims we make that our coffees are responsibly grown with respect to the environment, we have begun to provide third-party, independent audits of our partner coffee farms. Beginning with those in the Chiapas area of Mexico, Daniel Cooper, of Cooper Ecological Monitoring, Inc., is surveying specific conditions on our partner farms such as presence of forest-dependent animals, including migratory birds that winter in the neo-tropical forests in Mexico and Central America..

We want to stress that our green coffee purchasing approach is to source the highest quality coffee we can find while providing direction for and encouragement of sustainable coffee farming methods. Whether a partner farm is formally certified organic, shade grown, or fair trade, what matters most to us is the ecological reality of the farm, its commitment to environmental stewardship, and the way it treats its workers from the surrounding communities.

What we think is interesting is that some of our farms where the owners have not yet gone through the process to become shade-grown certified (for instance, Finca La Victoria) may support as many forest-dependent bird species as those that are formally certified. We will continue to investigate these patterns at all the farms that supply us with coffee.

If you care about coffee issues such as shade-grown, bird-friendly, organic, and fair trade, please take the time to read through our audits, and also please read our website section on Community Aid. You'll find the reality of coffee "politics" is often quite different and more complex than you might have thought.

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List of Coffee Estate Farm Audits by Country

Ecological assessment of seven coffee farms in the Soconusco
region of southeastern Chiapas, Mexico (3.17 MB)