Reef-conscious coffees on the menu

When you think about the origin of your morning coffee, countries like Brazil, Ethiopia, Colombia, or Peru come to mind. But what about the beans grown in our own backyard?

Australia’s coffee industry has been undergoing a resurgence over the last 30 to 40 years, with Far North Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands now home to eight coffee growers and a nearly $5 million industry that is poised for growth.

The tablelands are a rich tapestry of agriculture – truly one of Australia’s flourishing food bowls.

Coffee plantations thrive across the region’s diversity of growing conditions with varied elevation, soil types and rainfall, meaning brews of all different taste profiles can come from this one area.

The Atherton Tablelands are also important to the conservation of the Great Barrier Reef.

Three of the region’s coffee plantations, accounting for nearly half of the 300-hectares of coffee grown in the region, have recently become Hort360 Reef Certified.

We caught up with two of these growers, Lucy Stocker of Crater Mountain Coffee, as well as Debbie and Tina Caamaño of Caamaño Estate Coffee, and were left abuzz with appreciation for these growers’ devotion for honing their farming and processing skills for the betterment of their plants, their harvest, and their land.

Lucy Stocker, Crater Mountain Coffee

Crater Mountain Coffee

Lucy Stocker, owner of Crater Mountain Coffee, is the daughter of pioneering Australian avocado growers. She established her career in engineering, but knew agriculture would always play a role in her life.

Acquiring their Upper Barron property in 2017, Lucy and her husband James started with “12 trees in the garden,” and now have a plantation of 30,000 trees.

Lucy grows the highest altitude coffee in Australia and her plantation is across some steep slopes, which has led to some key learnings on planting timing and methodology.

To minimise her trees’ exposure to frosts, Lucy plants on the downslope for cold air drainage, but learnt some difficult lessons early on, once prepping and planting too close to the wet season resulting in significant erosion and plant loss.

She now finds “that little window” to plant and prep that is not so hot, dry, and harsh on her seedlings, but gives the plants enough time to establish before the wet season.

Other land management measures Lucy uses to look after her soil and her plants are contouring around her headlands at the bottom and top of hills to minimise sediment flow.

Ground cover is also important, as is mulching under the trees to minimise any soil exposure. Lucy also plants pinto peanut to maintain ground cover and put nitrogen back into the soil, but not compete with the coffee trees.

In managing her expanding coffee empire, Reef Certification made sense to Lucy for two reasons: improving farm management and highlighting to consumers that Crater Mountain Coffee is grown according to best management practice for protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

“The principles Reef Certification assesses were things I was trying to do with the farm. You know, things like sediment and erosion control, managing chemical use, record keeping,” Lucy said.

“It was on my mind to get more organised, and I could see how the structure of Reef Certification would work for me… I was tracking some things in an ad hoc way, but going through certification gave me some nice structure,” she explained.

Hort360 GBR Facilitator for the Wet Tropics Paula Ibell valued Lucy’s positive feedback on how participation in the Reef Certification process helped her with managing her farm.

“Lucy has always been very organised, so it’s great to hear that her farm management has been further improved through using the Hort360 platform, templates, and undergoing the Reef Certification process,” Paula said.

Inspired by the boutique nature of wine making and tasting, Lucy sees similarities in what wine drinkers look for and what small-batch coffee drinkers may also seek when choosing beans.

"The people who consume our coffee are interested in place of origin and farm practices."

In that vein, she sees Reef Certification as a way of highlighting the best practice approach she takes in terms of land stewardship when growing her coffee.

Tina & Debbie Caamano, Caamano Estate Coffee

Caamaño Estate Coffee

It was the Reef Certification stickers on bags of Lucy’s coffee that caught the attention of fellow FNQ growers Debbie, José, and Tina Caamaño who chose to pursue Reef Certification as a result.

The Caamaños are multigenerational farmers, with husband-and-wife team José and Debbie having grown small crops before becoming established citrus growers in the mid-1990s. In 2016 they acquired their Mareeba property, and set about establishing coffee trees from seed, with the first plants going into the ground in 2020.

All four of their children have been involved in the family’s farming along the way, with eldest daughter Tina establishing her own citrus farm and working with her parents on the coffee. Tina’s son Marcus has recently finished school and begun working for his grandparents fulltime.

For the Caamaños, Reef Certification is about taking responsibility.

“If you’re a big corporate and something goes wrong, you’ve got someone else to blame or you can replace that manager. You can’t do that on family farms. You’re responsible.”

“When Tina saw the Hort360 Reef Certified sticker on Lucy’s coffee we looked into it and saw it as a way of showing we’re doing the right thing by our land,” Debbie said.

Unlike Lucy’s steep slopes, the Caamaños had their ex-herb farm laser levelled before they began planting, but they similarly take many measures to protect and nourish their soil and their trees.

The family has continued to follow the environmentally sustainable farming practices they’d used for decades in now nurturing their coffee crop.

They mix their own compost teas to feed their farm, using humic substances and inoculants, as well as monitoring and encouraging beneficial insects with an entomologist making fortnightly checks.

Lucy spoke of using the organic matter from slashing as mulch put under her trees. The Caamaños use the same method for their citrus, but for their coffee operations they prefer to let the trees self-mulch. They found the slashing method put too much weed seed under the coffee trees.

Now, they let the harvester shake the leaves off the trees to provide the mulch and the darkness under the trees prevents weed germination.

In fact, the seeds dropped by the harvester provide new plants for the Caamaños to bolster their stocks.

Working for the same outcome in different conditions

Although the growing conditions of Crater Mountain Coffee and Caamaño Estate Coffee are like chalk and cheese, there is a clear dedication to managing the terrain, the soil health, minimising run off, and working harmoniously with their surrounds.

With changing global conditions making locally grown coffee an increasingly attractive proposition for Australian coffee drinkers, having Reef Certified growers at the forefront of our growing FNQ industry means we can be confident the industry and our morning cuppa are in good hands.

Hort360 Reef Certification is part of the Hort360 GBR Program being delivered by Growcom, the project delivery arm of the Queensland Fruit & Vegetable Growers (QFVG).

Grower participation in the Hort360 GBR Program for benchmarking and Reef Certification is free and voluntary.

Contact your closest Hort360 GBR Officer to learn more: www.growcom.com.au/hort360-gbr

Hort360 GBR is funded through the Queensland Government’s Queensland Reef Water Quality Program.