Coffee Prices Soar — So Why Are Yunnan’s Coffee Farmers Still Worried?

The washed coffee beans from Brother He’s estate are now ordered directly by coffee trading companies and neighbourhood cafés in Shanghai. Owners of other coffee estates also buy washed coffee beans from him in bulk for further processing and final roasting. “Coffee’s in great demand right now,” says Brother He. “They’re planning to sell my coffee to America.”

The era of rock-bottom prices for Yunnan coffee is over, at least for now. But like growing regions abroad, Yunnan’s coffee belt has been hit by natural disasters on more than one occasion. Facing such challenges, what can Yunnan’s coffee farmers do to prepare in advance?

III. Exploring the Ecological Transition

Three years ago, Ziling and Xiao Houzi, founders of the LOHAS Community Lab, arrived in Pu’er, and climate change soon became a thorny challenge laid squarely before them.

Coffee trees flower at the onset of the rainy season; the bloom is brief, lasting typically only two to three days. Once the blossoms fall, the trees set fruit, and when the rains end, the harvest of ripe cherries begins.

They have found that in recent years Pu’er’s climate has grown unpredictable, with extreme weather events becoming frequent, while the coffee tree’s growth cycle is highly sensitive to rainfall. Over the past three years, the first rains of each year in Pu’er have come earlier each time — last year shifting from March–May to February–March — causing the trees to flower prematurely. Yet the rain has been erratic, and those early buds often dry out and die in March and April, sharply reducing fruit-set. This year, after the rainy season officially arrived in late May, the sheer volume and duration of the rain meant some coffee trees’ lateral branches could no longer bear the weight of the fruit and had to be propped up with poles to prevent breakage.

At the LOHAS Community Lab, Ziling and Xiao Houzi have been experimenting in test plots on a coffee estate, planting comfrey, mung bean, marigold, ryegrass, Sudan grass, October green bean, lablab bean and orchard grass. They sow these in the rainy season and cut them down when the dry season arrives, using the cuttings as green manure to cover the soil and enrich it for the coffee trees. This green manure can replace chemical fertiliser, improving soil quality, strengthening the trees, and making them more resilient to climate change.

Yet the shift in Pu’er’s rainfall patterns has also disrupted their green manure programme. In May 2023 the rains were late, and what awaited the seedlings was over a month of drought. By the time the rain finally came at the end of June, the green manure had been wiped out entirely. The first year’s plan ended in failure; fortunately, weeds grew up in the plots and could be cut for ground cover, though the nutrient value fell far short of expectations.

Climate change brings more than erratic rainfall for coffee farmers. Heat and drought can also cause massive crop losses. A few years ago, Chen Si began intercropping and relay intercropping fruit trees among his coffee rows as shade trees. During dry spells and heatwaves, these trees cool the farmland, shielding the coffee from sunscald. It gives the trees an extra layer of protection against disease and disaster while boosting biodiversity on the farm. Besides coffee, he also grows over ten mu of terrace-planted tea bushes.

Liao Xiugui, now in his eighties, was once an agricultural technician who has been guiding farmers in Pu’er to grow coffee since the 1980s and founded the Xiao’aozi Estate. He believes a stable microclimate and ecologically sound cultivation can also elevate coffee quality. He plants shade trees on the estate’s higher ground, lets grass grow and mulch the soil in the hollows, and returns coffee pulp to the land as fertiliser, using deep ploughing to improve the soil. “For over twenty years, the estate has never used chemical herbicides, and pest control is done entirely by hand. Walking through the grounds, you can hear insects singing and birds calling everywhere. We’ve had two dry years, but we’re not worried — the ecosystem is well established, so the land’s drought resistance and water-holding capacity are strong. The flavour of our coffee beans has actually become more pronounced.”

Of course, there are simpler methods too: many farmers lay plastic mulch film over the soil to retain moisture during droughts. But Ziling thinks this does nothing to address soil and water erosion and only adds plastic pollution — by no means a long-term solution.

Wide swathes of monoculture, bare-soil planting, heavy use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and plastic mulch film — these are the practices that currently appear to offer the best cost–benefit ratio. Yet experience has long shown that the coffee tree, a perennial woody crop with exacting demands on flavour, may not sustain long-term health under such short-term fixes. Some experts, civil-society organisations and farmers have begun exploring more environmentally friendly, more ecologically attuned methods of growing coffee.

After three straight years of setbacks and exploration, Ziling feels that coffee cultivation today offers neither fully controllable techniques nor fixed timing benchmarks; every attempt still feels like blind men examining an elephant. They plan to install weather stations on the trial and control plots of a coffee estate to monitor rainfall, air humidity, temperature and soil moisture conditions. In parallel, they will sow green manure seeds a full month before the rainy season begins, to see whether the fluctuation in morning and evening temperature and humidity might encourage earlier germination. They are also adjusting the timing and type of fertiliser applications to strengthen nutrient supply at the critical stages of the coffee trees’ flowering and fruiting period.