Birds, Farms and Conservation by Bill Wilson

"By careful consideration of what we eat and drink we can help the birds we love, family farmers and the Earth we all share." ~ Bill Wilson

I was born and grew up in Bergen County New Jersey in the 1950’s and early ‘60s. Bergen County forms the northeastern corner of the state with the Hudson River along the eastern border. In what is now one of the most densely populated areas of the U.S., we boys and girls of the era enjoyed a freedom and natural abundance in our patch that seems impossible today.

​And one of the best parts of that time were local farms and the wild things on them. The farms around us were all small and most raised vegetables and fruit for farm stand sale, export to the commercial markets in New York City or, in the case of apples, for making cider. A few were not really farms but estates with pasture and small kitchen gardens. We did not look for exotic or rare birds but it was on the farms that we most often saw the unusual – at least unusual for us.  

Above: Northern Highlands Nicaragua - The highlands of northern Nicaragua are one of the richest, most important areas in the tropics for migrant songbirds -- and as we found again this winter, the Bird Friendly certified shade coffee farms in this region are not just preserving prime bird habitat, but reforesting previously denuded areas because of the demand for Bird Friendly coffee. Everything you see in this picture, to the horizon, are such biodiverse shade coffee farms -- and superb songbird.

An exciting Goshawk late one fall, a Snowy Owl sliding through a wood lot one January, waves of Common Nighthawks over ripened corn in late August evenings, Ruby-crowned Kinglets bobbing on spent raspberry thickets in November and on one occasion an Eastern Meadowlark classically posed on a rock in the middle of a slightly used pasture. 

There were fewer farms each year. Now there are just two left in my old territory. As development and DDT took hold, much of the abundance we took as normal began to disappear. By the late 1960s it was all but gone and so was I, an urban dweller for the next four decades but lucky enough to visit rural and wild places regularly. As time passed and the family farm disappeared at an alarming rate in America, my thoughts frequently went back to these wonderfully pleasant places of my youth.

So when, in 2008, we started a ‘Bird Friendly®’ coffee business and I visited farms in Latin America where our coffee comes from, I was struck by the extraordinary abundance of bird life and of natural habitat on these coffee farms. Different habitat, different flora and fauna, different history, culture and languages but somehow many of the same enchanting attributes of family farms in the 1950’s at home. The connector, beside the commerce of coffee, was the presence in our winter of many of my boyhood birds. Inspecting a coffee plant nursery 2,273 miles from home and coming face-to-face with a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak was almost as exciting as any birding experience can be. Mixed flocks of orioles and warblers, furtive Wood Thrush without their spring song, humming birds galore and western birds like Scissor-tailed Flycatchers that only existed in my boyhood books back when are as casually present as the bird bounty of my youth. Underlying all is the honest environmental stewardship of the family farmers that tend the farms, some families growing coffee as far back as two hundred years. While coffee is the cash crop, fruits, vegetables, chickens, and an occasional goat, pig, cow or horse rounds out the domesticated flora and fauna. The exotic wild birds, orchids, shrubs, first growth trees, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies and bees of the tropics mixed in with occasional jaguar, sloth and howler monkey – existing in complete harmony with the farms - form a tapestry of sustainability that is exhilarating.  ​

Contrasting with these organic rustic shade canopy family farms carrying the Smithsonian ‘Bird Friendly’ certification, the ‘sun’ coffee industrial plantations of big agricultural enterprise are bereft of almost all the fecund bio-diversity found on our coffee farms. Tropical forest continues to disappear at alarming rates. Compounding the problem, chemically laden big agri is replacing traditional rustic shade family coffee farms with eco-desert ‘sun’ coffee plantations. Keeping as much of the old sustainable ways as possible is an environmental imperative. 

We sponsored scientific surveys on the coffee farms we buy from to ‘certify the certification’ for ourselves. Confirmation: the surveys conducted on the co-op farms of the Northern Nicaraguan Highlands that supply some of Birds & Beans Coffee found more than 130 species of birds, including vireos, thrushes, flycatchers, tanagers, and orioles. The survey teams also found several warblers, including high numbers of Tennessee, Chestnut-sided, Black-throated Green and Wilson’s warblers, as well as Golden-winged Warblers—a candidate species for endangered listing in the U.S. Over 30 species of Neotropical migrants and more than 100 indigenous species of birds share the farms we covered.

Above: Jaus Family Farm – With over five linear miles of buffer strips on four hundred plus acres, this Organic Valley working farm provides extraordinary abundant habitat for birds, pollinators and other wildlife.​​

This led me to think about US farms and bird conservation. My admiration for the family farmers in the over 1,800 member Organic Valley co-op led to us sponsoring late spring surveys matching those we had done on the coffee farms in winter. Another set of great results.

Many of the same migratory species from the Latin American bird surveys also showed up in on Organic Valley dairy farms in the Midwest and East that found more than 50 at-risk breeding bird species. Specific species found in the Organic Valley surveys included Indigo Buntings, American Redstart warblers, and 12 Baltimore Orioles on a farm in Minnesota; breeding tanagers, orioles, and buntings on a farm in Ohio; four species of Neotropical warblers that winter in coffee farms—Black-and-White, Blackburnian, Chestnut-sided, and Black-throated Green warblers—on a farm in Vermont; and an unexpected treasure trove of 22 Indigo Buntings, along with tanagers, orioles, and Wood Thrush in North Carolina. Importantly these farms are also all virtual sanctuaries for grassland birds of great conservation concern, including Grasshopper Sparrows, Eastern Meadowlarks and Bobolinks.

The coffee and dairy farms surveyed and those with similar certifications provide extremely valuable habitat for Neotropical migratory songbirds at both ends of their range. Some of our most vibrant and beautiful birds are getting a conservation boost at times of their years when they most need it. Sustainable farming is good for birds, farmers, workers and the environment.

If North American consumer trends of increasing consumption of organic food and beverage continue, we may truly be headed back to better days of farms that support the natural world.

There is no official certification for coffee labeled as ‘shade-grown’; indeed, some coffee with ‘shade-grown’ on the packaging is grown under banana trees to which artificial fertilizers and pesticides are heavily applied. The official Bird Friendly® certification from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center combines USDA Organic standards with requirements for forest shade cover, multilayered canopy, and the presence of epiphytes. Birds & Beans coffee has grown since our foundation. Our Boston and Toronto based roaster and retailer of Bird Friendly coffee now buys coffee from over 2,250 family farms in Nicaragua, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Imagine helping preserve over 100,000 acres of prime Neotropical forest environment just by drinking coffee !

Significant growth in US organic dairy acreage is also a hopeful sign of the future. As overall organic farm acreage in the United States has doubled since 2003, a significant portion of that growth has been driven by the popularity of Organic Valley dairy products. In 2014, Organic Valley dairy farms constituted about half of all organic farming acreage in Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin, and about a quarter of all organic farming acreage in Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. In Indiana, Organic Valley dairy farms accounted for over three-quarters of total organic farming acreage.

By careful consideration of what we eat and drink we can help the birds we love, family farmers and the Earth we all share. Maybe the best part of all this is that there are boys and girls out there today who can experience these farms and enjoy the same kind of exhilarating joy and freedom that “going to the farm” can deliver, the kind of experience that the birds of my boyhood gave to me.

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Photo: Bill Wilson, Co-Founder of Birds & Beans Coffee LLC

Bill Wilson is a consumer marketing expert with over 30 years of domestic and international experience. He is the Co-Founder of Birds & Beans Coffee LLC. 

Birds & Beans ® is the only coffee brand in the US that solely roasts Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center ‘Bird Friendly®’ certified beans, 100% shade grown, organic and Fair-Trade certified coffee. The enterprise is a for profit conservation business aimed at helping stop songbird population decline.

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