Coffee is one of life’s small luxuries – adding flavor to the day, for many coffee is essential to their daily routine. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of specialty coffee blends and exotic beans, along with skilled baristas transforming the humble cup of coffee into something of an art form.
This coffee reformation has been coined “third-wave coffee” as it brought a new enthusiasm for premium coffees, along with an increased demand for organic, fair-trade, and sustainable coffees and brands that meet the certification criteria of UTZ, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and USDA Organic Certification. The exponential growth of the Starbucks Corporation put coffee at the heart of popular culture, with an estimated 38,000 locations in 86 different countries, and Starbucks has found value in sustainable practices.
Coffee is one of the world’s most highly traded commodities, and the market for sustainable coffee is expanding. Companies that contribute to the growing, harvesting, processing, distribution, and retail of our beloved coffee beans can also offer some exciting investment opportunities. Leading companies like ICL Group are making strategic investments in products like biostimulants, which help boost sustainable coffee bean production. This article offers insights into the role of biostimulants in coffee production and how ICL Group is working to improve agronomy in the $130 billion global coffee industry.
What are Biostimulants?
Most of us are familiar with the concept of fertilizers – organic or synthetic substances added to soil or plant tissues to supply essential nutrients that support plant growth, enhance soil fertility, and improve crop yields and health. Biostimulants also enhance plant growth, improving resilience and health, but do so by stimulating the natural processes within the plants themselves.
Biostimulants help growers to adapt their crop plans to the environmental stresses of extreme weather events. Biostimulants can also encourage plants to grow stronger root systems and provide increased resilience to pests and diseases. As well as delivering improved growth, biostimulants can also contribute to better soil health.
Smallholders and family farming units that depend on their annual coffee bean harvest for survival generally operate on narrow margins. Coffee farming communities, often geographically isolated in remote locations, typically face three major problems:
● Access to markets and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices.
● Young people/next generation, ‘laborers’ – leaving the land to live in cities.
● Environmental stresses that affect yields and coffee bean quality.
Biostimulants can give local farmers a vital edge by improving the quality and size of bean harvests. Over the medium term, increased prosperity can reduce urban drift, helping to strengthen rural coffee-growing communities. A significant advantage of biostimulants is that growers can select them in conjunction with fertilizer to create tailored solutions for specific crops, soil types, and climatic conditions.
ICL’s Biostimulants for Coffee Cultivation
ICL Group, a global leader in specialty minerals and crop nutrition solutions, is one of the largest fertilizer manufacturers in the world. In addition to producing highly advanced fertilizers, they also manufacture a range of BIOZ biostimulants. Keep Green, which ICL designed specifically for coffee growers, is one of the most innovative biostimulants. Keep Green was developed in Brazil – the world’s largest coffee producer – and is designed to help plants cope with high levels of sunlight and temperature stress.
Keep Green uses a sophisticated foliar process (it is sprayed directly onto plants) to coat the leaves in a protective wax. The coating provides continued defenses against sun and UV radiation damage, even after prolonged exposure to tropical rains. Briefly, without delving into advanced science, Keep Green biostimulant works on several levels to increase chlorophyll and improve photosynthesis. The result is healthier plants and a significant increase in per-hectare coffee bean yields. An application of Keep Green every sixty days can increase final earnings by up to 9%.
Improving Sustainability with Biostimulants
Another major issue for coffee growers – and local communities – is water. Coffee plantations require a high volume of water to produce good yields. In tropical areas, water requirements are met by rainfall, but in drier regions, producers have to tap into local water resources for irrigation requirements. Biostimulants help to address the problem by increasing plant resilience to abiotic stresses, including drought conditions. Effective water management is a major component of sustainable agriculture, and biostimulants help in reducing water consumption.
Promoting Sustainability as a Way of Life
ICL Group’s biostimulants help growers at varying altitudes meet the challenges of sustainable farming and adapt to a wide variety of environmental stresses.
ICL continues to research products for coffee growers and innovations in biostimulants that can be integrated into precision growing solutions across the entire global coffee belt.
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Demand for coffee is growing, and a segment of coffee drinkers make their consumer choices based on ethical considerations like fair trade and sustainability. The Starbucks boom for exotic coffee blends – put sustainability firmly on the agenda for coffee growers. Sustainability in the coffee industry has been primarily consumer-driven, pioneering sustainability trends that are seen in other agronomic sectors.
Advanced Agtech products like biostimulants offer benefits to growers (and rural agricultural communities) regardless of location or choice of crops. The Agtech sector as a whole holds promise for investors as new technologies transform farming and food production. Through its range of biostimulants, advanced fertilizers, and food production technologies, ICL is making important innovative contributions to sustainability in agriculture. It’s an excellent company to research for insights into the Agtech sector and the future of global food production.
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