Shade-grown coffee is grown in the understory of ecologically diverse native forest. This is the traditional way of growing coffee. In fact, coffee plants naturally need only four or five hours of sun per day.

On large-scale coffee plantations, plants are grown in full sun to make picking and fertilizing easier. This is more profitable for the owner, but such plantations often harm the environment and coffee workers through deforestation and chemical overuse.

Shade-grown coffee fields, like the one pictured above, are quite different.

In a shade-grown coffee field, the surrounding forest is full of birds, monkeys, and other native animals. Songbirds who spend the summer in our back yards spend winters in such forests. Large coffee plantations destroy this habitat to plant long rows of coffee.