About Us
Our Mission
Bird & Wild coffee is on a mission to help protect migrating birds, support the RSPB, and give you a great tasting Fairtrade Organic coffee one cup at a time.For every bag of Bird & Wild sold, you are helping the RSPB, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre and the Fairtrade Foundation. Bird & Wild only roasts seasonal coffee certified as Bird Friendly and Shade-Grown by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre and contributes to support their research and conservation programs.
Working in partnership with the RSPB, 6% of sales is donated to the RSPB to help give nature a home, as well as being Certified Fairtrade and Organic. Our coffees are naturally grown under the rainforest canopy, a haven for birds and other wildlife and ideal conditions for nurturing deliciously different beans with a taste of the wild.
Under the shade of the tropical highland rainforests, coffee is allowed to grow slowly in wild conditions to develop complex, distinctive and smooth flavours. Bird Friendly Certified coffees are grown on forest farms that protect the diverse tree canopy providing a haven to threatened migratory birds, insects and other wildlife.
What is Bird Friendly Coffee
The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in the United States has developed the only 100% Organic and Shade Grown coffee certification in the world called Bird Friendly Certification.
No other bag guarantees that every bean is produced organically and under high-quality shade, ensuring tropical "agroforests" are preserved and migratory birds find a healthy haven when they travel from northern climes to those faraway farms producing the beans.
With widespread clear cutting for sun coffee plantations, it's imperative to protect the tropical forest that remains and rehabilitate degraded ecosystems. Every cup of Bird Friendly coffee you drink encourages more farmers to grow in the shade, which is good for birds and for people.
Firstly, the coffee is certified Organic, which means managing a healthy soil base and applying no harmful pesticides to the coffee that could otherwise run off into streams and rivers. This helps reduce the billions of pounds of noxious chemicals injected annually into natural ecosystems that support wildlife and communities.
Second, a variety of native shade trees are grown throughout the coffee plantation. The combination of foliage cover, tree height and animal diversity provides suitable migratory bird habitat while maintaining productive farms. Producers must be recertified every three years to ensure they continue to meet these requirements and can truly call themselves Bird Friendly.
Third, our coffees are Fairtrade Certified, which ensures producers in developing countries are paid a fair price for their work, by companies in developed countries based on partnerships, which means that the interests of farmers and workers are just as important as other commercial considerations. Key principles ensure that trading practices are fair and not one-sided, prices paid are fair and sufficient for producers and workers to earn more than enough to meet their day-to-day needs, payments are made in advance to ensure the supplier can fulfill orders, and safe working conditions including non-discrimination and welfare of children.
The result is a better-tasting truly ethical and environmentally friendly coffee.
What is Shade Grown Coffee?
Traditionally coffee was grown commercially under other trees that provided shade. Indeed, in its natural wild state, coffee much prefers shade in the heat of the tropics.
However, since the 1970s, new sun-tolerant coffee plants have been developed with the aim to yield higher production rates to produce larger yields through higher-density, open planting over huge areas of land.
Unfortunately, this cultivation practices of open planting is completely unsustainable, destroys the land through overexposure to the sun and has a negative impact on the environment that is not talked enough about.
As a result, the concept of Shade Grown Coffee, a return to traditional coffee farming, was born. A canopy of assorted types of shade trees is created to cultivate shade-grown coffee, which incorporates principles of natural ecology to promote natural ecological relationships.
Find out more below!
Why drink Bird & Wild Coffee?
Aside from the great taste of Bird & Wild’s Fairtrade Organic Bird-Friendly Shade Grown Coffee, here are some bite size benefits to the world:
It helps plant diversity with typically 90 to 120 species of plant and 13 to 58 species of tree on a single site. Herb diversity is typically 3 to 4 times higher as well.
It helps insect diversity with 609 species of insect found in a Shade Grown Coffee site in Mexico.
It helps both native and migratory bird species diversity. For example, 184 bird species (including 46 migratory bird species) were found on a single Shade Grown Coffee site in Mexico. This compares with as few as 6-12 bird species found in unshaded coffee monocultures.In a study of shade vs. sun coffee comparisons in Guatemala, overall bird abundance and diversity were 30% greater, respectively, in shaded farms than sun farms. Indeed, shade-grown trees housed two-thirds of the bird species found in natural forests in the same geographic area.
Shade Grown Coffee promotes mammal diversity. For example, a Shade Grown Coffee site in India found 28 species of mammals in one site alone.
Many species of bees are attracted to shaded polycultures that have a variety of flowering plants in addition to coffee. In a shade grown study in Indonesia, bee populations rose by 90%.It protects soil. The presence of canopy and midstory vegetation in shaded polycultures helps reduce soil erosion as well stabilize steep, mountainous slopes. Typically, soil moisture is 42% lower in unshaded plantations than in shaded plantations and there is significantly less runoff of surface water in shaded plantations than in unshaded plantations.
It acts as a carbon sink. Just like natural forests, the carbon sequestered in a shade‐grown coffee farm’s shade trees will be stored in the tree trunks, limbs, leaves, and roots of the foliage as opposed to being in the atmosphere and adding to global warming.
Bird & Wild is Fairtrade and Organic Certified as well!
Certifications
Our coffee is approved by
