This past season, we got less rain than we’re used to, and for longer stretches than we’re used to. It showed up first in the soil — drying out faster between rains, staying compacted longer once it did dry. Coffee plants don’t fail overnight from that kind of stress; they just slowly stop putting energy into anything but survival, which shows up months later as a smaller, weaker harvest if nothing changes in between.
So a few things changed.
Where we focused first: the soil, not just the water
The instinct in a drought is to think entirely about water — more irrigation, more frequency. That’s part of it, but not the whole answer, because dry, compacted soil doesn’t hold onto whatever water it does get. We put more attention into ground cover and mulch across sections that had been left bare, since bare soil loses moisture far faster than soil with something growing or decomposing on top of it.
Shade, reconsidered
Some of our plots have more canopy cover than others. The shaded sections noticeably handled the dry stretch better — cooler soil, slower moisture loss. That’s pushed us to think more deliberately about where and how we manage shade trees going forward, rather than treating them as a secondary decision behind the coffee itself.
Prioritizing, plot by plot
We didn’t have unlimited water or labor to throw at every section equally, so we made real trade-offs — putting more resources toward the plots most likely to recover fully, and accepting a lighter touch on sections we judged more resilient anyway. That’s not a comfortable thing to decide, but pretending every plot needed identical treatment would have meant every plot got less than it needed.
What we’re still working through
We don’t have this solved. Longer dry stretches may not be a one-season event, and we’re watching that closely rather than assuming things bounce back to normal on their own. Some of what we’re testing — the shade management, the ground cover work — ties directly into the soil health practices we’ve been comparing notes on with neighboring farms, since none of us are dealing with this in isolation either.
