Jay Ruskey is one of the first farmers to be
growing coffee commercially in California. His coffee plants share the
farm with avocado and cherimoya trees and passion fruit vines.
Credit
Morgan Maassen for The New York Times
GOLETA, Calif. — There is a new crop growing in Southern California’s famous avocado groves — coffee.
About
two dozen farms between San Diego and here, just outside Santa Barbara,
are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in
what may be the first serious effort in the United States to
commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.
“When
people hear I’m growing coffee, they typically make a face and say
something like, ‘Well, how good can coffee grown in California be?’”
said Jay Ruskey, the owner of Good Land Organics, who is widely regarded
as the father of the state’s nascent coffee business.
The
farmers are hoping to capitalize on a variety of changing factors
abroad and here, including the aging of California’s avocado trees,
which are producing less fruit.
The
avocado growers face major disruptions in their business, including
increased competition from Mexican imports, less access to water and
rising real estate prices, all of which are forcing them to rethink that
crop. But thanks to Mr. Ruskey, they have realized that their sprawling
avocado trees provide perfect shade for high-quality coffee bushes.
One
variety of Mr. Ruskey’s beans, Pacamara, emits an earthy scent like the
smell of California dirt and new plants in spring. His Geisha beans
have a light and fruity flavor with low acidity. Bourbon finishes with a
chocolate taste.
As
growers like him consider the move into growing coffee beans, they are
eyeing machinery that can harvest the beans, which would reduce labor
costs, as well as a contraption called a demucilager that mechanically
strips coffee berry skin and pulp off the beans, rather than using water
to clean them.
And
they see more and more American consumers willing to spend $8 or $12
for a cup of joe, which would offset their high costs of production.
At
the same time, climate change threatens to damage the coffee crop in
the tropical highlands that produce nearly all the world’s beans,
potentially opening up a lucrative opportunity in the $20 billion export
market for beans. Last year, some small Brazilian coffee farmers lost
90 percent of their crop to drought and heat, and similar conditions in
Sumatra in western Indonesia made it uneconomical for many farmers there
to harvest what little crop they had.
Mr.
Ruskey has grown coffee on his farm for more than a decade, but it is
only over the last three or four years, as his coffee started winning
high scores in taste tests, that other farmers have begun to try their
hands at growing it. Still, Doug Welsh, roastmaster at Peet’s, notes
that the number of coffee bushes growing in California today is 30 times
what it was 13 years ago when Mr. Ruskey started, or about 14,000
plants.
“We
probably roast more coffee at Peet’s in one day than is being produced
on all the farms growing coffee here, but I’m looking at this as a cup
half full,” Mr. Welsh said. “It’s early days, but I think it could at
least get to be as big as the Hawaiian coffee business.”
(There
are roughly 800 coffee farms in the Hawaiian Islands producing as much
as nine million pounds of unroasted beans a year; California produces
only hundreds of pounds. Globally, 12 billion pounds of coffee are
consumed each year.)
These
growers aim to appeal to the premium coffee market. More than half the
adult coffee drinkers in America reported drinking a specialty coffee
daily, according to the National Coffee Association, or roughly twice as
many as in 2010.
“People
are shifting away from the way my grandparents drank coffee, which was
at breakfast and made from whatever coffee was on sale — it was simply
fuel,” said Peter Giuliano, chief research officer at the Specialty
Coffee Association. “They’re willing to pay for something unusual.”
A
pound of dried green specialty coffee beans can sell for as much as
$120 in today’s market, according to Andy Mullins, a retired technology
executive who has planted coffee on his property east of Santa Barbara.
“You should be able to produce a pound for under $30, which is a superb
profit margin,” Mr. Mullins said. “The only places that see better
margins than that are software companies.”
Mr.
Mullins is not a coffee drinker, but he caught the bug after visiting
Mr. Ruskey’s farm, which cascades down a mountainside some 650 feet
above the Pacific Ocean. Dragon fruit trees and finger lime bushes are
interspersed among cherimoya and avocado trees, and each fruit crop is
enlisted to help others grow. The avocado trees are the workhorses,
acting as trellises for passion fruit vines and providing shade for the
coffee bushes.
His
profits from growing those unusual crops has helped persuade other
farmers to take on the risk and expense of growing coffee. It can take
as many as four years for coffee plants to get established, said Mark
Gaskell, a farm adviser in the University of California system, meaning a
grower must make a significant upfront investment before seeing any
return.
In
addition, coffee is labor-intensive. Many of the coffee growers here
are looking to Brazil, where coffee harvesting machines have replaced
the people who picked and processed coffee, for ideas about how to
reduce labor costs.
“The
way they do it there would remind you of how cotton or almonds are
harvested, highly mechanized and technical,” Mr. Welsh said, though he
noted that such machinery tends to operate on large, flat spaces that
are very different from coastal California’s mountainous terrain.
Many
California avocado groves are aging, confronting their owners with a
variety of challenges — and coffee offers one sort o
Avocado
trees were popular because they are easy to grow, requiring water, a
little fertilizer and almost no maintenance. But water is now a more
expensive resource, and because avocado trees are traditionally not
pruned, older trees have dense foliage that discourages fruiting.
That
was the problem Mr. Mullins faced when he retired to a home in the
Santa Barbara area. “The home we purchased came with four acres of
avocado trees, and we thought, Hey, that could be an interesting thing
to get involved with,” he said.
But
he soon discovered that his avocado trees were 30 years old and not so
productive. His options were to cut them back severely to regenerate
growth, replace them or prune them, each of which would require
significant expense and put the grove out of production for at least two
years.
So
Mr. Mullins began looking into what’s known as high-density planting,
and that led him to Mr. Ruskey, who is widely known among such growers.
Good Land Organics looks more like a jungle than the cherimoya grove it
was when Mr. Ruskey’s family bought the property 27 years ago.
He
has planted cactuses that produce dragon fruit and avocado trees among
the cherimoyas, and everything is knitted together with passion fruit
vines. Their mingled roots help preserve soil, and their foliage creates
a shade that helps conserve water while providing just the right amount
of dappled sunshine for coffee bushes.
So
after spending some time at Good Land, Mr. Mullins and his wife, Linda,
planted coffee in their avocado grove. They are growing Geisha, a
Panamanian varietal that produces some of the world’s most expensive
coffee beans, and Caturra, a Colombian coffee that is the workhorse of
the specialty coffee business.
Willem
Boot, a consultant to the coffee industry, said that in many ways, the
climate along California’s southern coast was ideal for coffee. “You
have colder nights and warmer days pretty consistently, and the
temperature rarely gets close to freezing,” Mr. Boot said.
Such
weather patterns allow coffee berries to mature slowly, which is the
key to producing high-quality coffee. “Some of Jay’s coffees are truly
excellent and can succeed in the specialty market,” he said. The farm’s
Typica, a centuries-old Arabica variety, “is really great.”
In
2015, Mr. Ruskey took some of his exotic fruits and coffee berries to
Re:co, the coffee industry equivalent of TED conferences. “It put coffee
in the context of fruit,” Mr. Giuliano said. “Very few people in the
world get to taste a coffee berry,” he said, but when they do, it’s easy
to understand what makes the seeds inside, which become coffee beans,
special.
A
year earlier, Coffee Review, a trade publication, had given Good Land’s
Caturra coffee a score of 91 out of 100, and depending on the roast,
brew and time of harvest, the farm’s coffees have scored from the
mid-80s to the low 90s on other quality tests.
“There’s no question that Jay has proved good coffee can be grown in California,” Mr. Giuliano said.
Jason
Mraz, a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter known for his hit “The
Remedy,” expects to produce his first significant coffee crop in about
two years. “I started my career in a coffee house, and I love the coffee
culture,” Mr. Mraz said. “I knew right away that California coffee
could be special.”
So
two years ago, he and his farm crew planted some 2,500 coffee bushes
among the avocado groves on the 1,700 acres he farms near San Diego.
Each plant’s roots had to be caged to protect them from gophers. The
bushes were caged above ground, too, and then wrapped to insulate and
protect their leaves — just planting them took three months.
Today,
Mr. Mraz said, the bushes are waist high and producing a few coffee
berries. Only a handful were lost, mostly to gophers, coyotes and wind.
He gets a variety of reactions when he tells people about his coffee venture, he said.
“In
the 1960s, people didn’t think you could grow wine grapes in
California, either,” Mr. Mraz said. “I like to let the coffee deniers I
meet here know that not only is coffee growing well in California, it
also has its own flavor profile — and right now, it’s one of the rarest
coffees in the world.”
f transition.
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