How much rainforest can one cup of coffee help preserve? For those who buy coffee grown in the traditional manner, under the shade of rainforest trees, the answer is roughly 2.3 square feet per cup. It would be zero for many coffee drinkers because much of the coffee that people drink is not shade-grown coffee; most plantation owners remove native trees and forest to grow coffee.
As outlined by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center's groundbreaking publication in 1996 Coffee, Conservation & Commerce in the Western Hemisphere there are many types of coffee farms throughout the coffee-growing regions, and the best type for wildlife and preservation of trees is the traditional natural grown rustic coffee farm.
The major shift in farming methods appears to have happened in the 1970s when farmers began to modernize with chemicals that eliminated diseases that formed on sun-exposed coffee trees. As this practice became more and more popular, farms began removing the native shade trees to allow for more coffee trees. The sun coffee fields or technified coffee allowed the farmers to maximize yield and the speed at which they could harvest, but greatly damaged this ecosystem.
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