Two decades ago, researchers embarked on an experiment that would fundamentally challenge the prevailing scientific understanding of plant communities and ecosystem dynamics.

Before the arrival of the first people to North America, meandering rivers braided through the landscape, pooling up within earthen and brush dams and gently spilling into vast spongy wetlands. The slowly moving water hydrated otherwise barren land and fostered a vibrant ecosystem, legions of grazing bison, vivacious waterfowl, and one particularly adept hydrological engineer—the beaver.

Coffee-growing regions are quickly becoming hotter and drier while at the same time losing substantial tree cover. Trees and forests create and maintain their ideal conditions by producing rainfall, and coffee excels as a crop of economic significance that thrives as part of a forest-like system.

Genetically modified crops are touted as a panacea for many of the challenges modern farmers face. From pestilence and drought to declining yields, GM crops promise to make farming easier and more profitable for farmers while lessening the impact of agrochemicals. With each new harvest, it becomes increasingly clear that GM crops are yet another failed technological fix leaving us awash in adverse downstream effects.

The hype around sequestering carbon in our agricultural soils has become ubiquitous. As evidenced by the latest blockchain-backed startups, a race is underway to capture a US market valued at $4.6 trillion and simultaneously reverse climate change. But with all this zeal for locking up carbon in the soil, we are missing the fundamental principle of soil carbon: its value is in decomposition, not sequestration.

A common truism says that healthy plants come from healthy soil. But, just as nature doesn’t work in straight lines nor color in black and white, there is a more nuanced understanding of this dynamic between plants and soil. 

One of the more oft-cited business and productivity slogans is, "you can't manage what you don't measure." Yet, how often are we chasing the wrong metric and exacerbating the problem we are trying to solve? When it comes to working with complex natural systems like agriculture, the answer is more often than not.

The cascading effects of a pandemic, supply chain pressures, and war have skyrocketed the price of nitrogen fertilizer by as much as 300% since 2020. As a result, farmers of all types and sizes worldwide are taking a big hit – none more than coffee farmers.

Wendell Berry is one of the original and few remaining voices reminding us of the fundamental beauty in the process of cultivating the land.

Our food production system is full of risk and rife with uncertainty; from extreme weather to soaring input prices to crop diseases and pests, there is always an unanticipated challenge around the bend. So how can agriculture position itself to gain from disorder and uncertainty rather than collapse?

Coffee production is currently under a serious threat that could drastically change the coffee we drink each day, and potentially leave our cups dry.

Modern agriculture has provided for a tremendous amount of growth and progress in humanity as a whole, but the second-order effects of the industrial agriculture paradigm are resoundingly negative. How did a process of intrinsic vibrancy and life become a vicious cycle of degeneration?