Nowadays people want to know about where the coffee they buy comes from and are more environmentally conscious about their buying habits. Hence sustainability is of utmost concern while we talk about how coffee is grown and sourced. As a result, everyone related to coffee- producers, traders, and buyers are in search of better ways to cut their carbon footprints.
Becoming Carbon-neutral is now a top priority for the industry, but Carbon-negative is something you need to go further to achieve.
Understanding the Terminology
Let’s kick-start with the idea of a carbon footprint. It is the net sum of carbon dioxide that a company is accountable for releasing into the atmosphere. It is calculated by considering the “carbon cost” of everything from the use of fossil fuel, waste disposal, land clearance, etc.
The Carbon footprint of a Company is measured in tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq). As there are so many data points to consider, at times it becomes hard to compute the exact carbon footprint.
The brand or company will become carbon-neutral, once its carbon footprint reaches a net-zero. This is not at all an easy task for anyone to accomplish as it may sound like one. Elimination of emissions completely is often not feasible, as the use of energy or fuel is the fundamental part of most of the operations carried out in many businesses. Thus, minimizing carbon footprints and thereby becoming carbon-neutral is quite a hard nut to crack.
Institutions that look forward to cutting their carbon footprint can purchase “carbon credits” from the companies that run environmental schemes across the world such as reforestation, using green energy, oil regeneration, etc. By doing this way, they are funding a sustainable project elsewhere and this will lead to indirectly balance out their footprint.
Buying carbon credits is just one manner that can help companies to minimize their carbon footprint. If they go forward with eliminating carbon emissions till the point it reaches to remove more amount of CO2 than they produce, they are deemed to be carbon-negative.
How Kerchanshe Coffee Farms Marginalized the Carbon Emissions
The answer to what happens in the Coffee farms related to carbon emission is Carbon Sequestration; the natural absorption of CO2 present in the atmosphere. This occurs through numerous natural processes including Photosynthesis where plants make food for themselves using CO2 and water, producing and releasing the by-product oxygen into the atmosphere.
Like any other green plant, photosynthesis takes place in coffee plants as well. However, during the entire process of production from planting to processing, photosynthesis becomes inadequate to balance out the carbon emissions made. This is the reason why farms have adopted sustainable agriculture techniques like Agroforestry, where coffee plants get cultivated among fruit or other shade trees. The Kerchanshe Coffee farms is following this ideology ever since its birth because Kerchanshe knows that coffee plants that are cultivated under the forest shades of big trees grow slowly but bear the delicious cherries.
Effective execution of sustainable agriculture not only helps to lessen carbon footprints but also to enhance the soil health for the long term that in turn lifting the coffee quality. Further, you are extending your hands to conserve the biodiversity across the farm, preserving the habitats of plant and animal life existing there. Kerchanshe always takes utmost care in employing natural sustainable methods to cultivate quality coffee, causing no harm to mother nature and thereby reducing the carbon emissions to produce a net zero cup of coffee.
Wrapping Up
Initially, reducing carbon emissions remained a priority for businesses to mitigate their contribution to climate change. Environmentally responsible coffee production has become the key to market access as consumers continue to choose brands with sustainable values and practices.