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The threat of climate change looms large over the future of coffee production. If problems like leaf rust<\/a> and artificially low C prices<\/a> are the past and present hurdles for coffee growers, climate change is the certainly the future (though, in truth all three problems have existed and will continue to for years to come). Often colloquially known as \u201cglobal warming\u201d\u2014though we don\u2019t use that as much anymore because there are dum-dums<\/a> in this world who take the presence of cold weather as a sign that everything is a-ok\u2014climate change is best represented by extremes in weather, both hot and cold. And while the earth is warming and that is shifting the regions suitable for coffee production<\/a>, these swings in temperature can have a more immediate impact, decimating vulnerable coffee trees almost overnight.<\/p>\n But in a bizarre twist of fate, it was one of these temperature swings that led to the discovery of what the MIT Technology Review<\/a> calls a \u201cclimate-change-proof coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n The new F1 hybrid\u2014meaning it is the first-generation offspring of two genetically distant parents\u2014 is called Centroamericano<\/a> and was created in Costa Rica\u2019s Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center<\/a> (CATIE). A combination of Sudan Rume and T5295<\/a>\u2014a \u201cSarchimor\u201d variety hybrid made from Villa Sarchi and Timor\u2014Centroamericano was created for \u201cdisease resistance, yield, and taste;\u201d according to the article, \u201cit produces a high-quality beverage, yields over 20% more coffee beans than average per hectare, and shows high tolerance to coffee leaf rust, a much-feared plague.\u201d But no real thought was given to how it would hold up in extreme conditions.<\/p>\n Until February 6, 2017, that is. On that night at a test farm in Laos, the temperature underwent a drastic drop, bringing with it a frost that \u201cblackened and severely injured most of the trees on the plot.\u201d By the next morning, only three rows of trees had survived: \u201cthose with Centroamericano and two other hybrid varieties from Central America.\u201d<\/p>\n Scientists believe these trees survived due to something called \u201chybrid vigor,\u201d a concept more widely utilized in things like corn, poultry, and rice that has more recently found its way to coffee thanks to the work of Beno\u00eet Bertrand at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development and other researchers. Hybrid vigor is essentially the idea that each parent organism of the hybrid passes on to their offspring different genes, making it more genetically diverse and therefore more resilient.<\/p>\n The article notes that hybrid vigor may be a boon for the health of coffee, which is \u201cnotorious for its lack of diversity,\u201d with Latin American coffee having \u201can especially shallow genetic pool.\u201d And indeed, initial trials showed these new varieties to have 20-50% more hybrid vigor than their parents, were yielding more coffee, and were disease tolerant.<\/p>\n But the future of coffee hasn’t been secured just yet. Producing these F1 hybrids is expensive\u2014each seedling costs two to three times that of a normal seedling\u2014and they are incredibly unstable. Left to their own devices, these F1 hybrids would create any number of new varieties as the “parents\u2019 genes reshuffle to create new combinations.” This would lead to the loss of stability in the hybrid as well as the vigor.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Centroamericano represents a step forward in staring down climate change, a problem that doesn’t just impact the coffee industry but everyone, and as such is an issue that is going to require more than just coffee people to affect any real change. So until the Twitter-toting dodo birds <\/a>of the world jump on board with the idea that humanity needs to amend their practices for the earth to survive beyond our own noses, planning for surviving the worst may just be the best practice. Centroamericano may just be that plan for coffee.<\/p>\n Zac Cadwalader<\/a>\u00a0is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.\u00a0Read more Zac Cadwalader\u00a0on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Top image via MIT Technology Review<\/em><\/p>\n The post Have Scientists Found A “Climate-Change-Proof” Coffee Variety?<\/a> appeared first on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source: Coffee News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The threat of climate change looms large over the future of coffee production. If problems like leaf rust and artificially low C prices are the past and present hurdles for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[63,27,65,33,61,32,59,31,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}