What regenerative coffee farming looks like in East Africa

This story is brought to you by the Rainforest Alliance.

Japhat Njue Njiru wakes up at 5 AM every morning. He has a cup of coffee, then spends his day ensuring others can do the same.

By 7:00, Njiru has fed and milked his five cows before heading to the local market to sell the milk. 

By 8:30, when the cold begins to lift in Kinyaga, the small town in the foothills of Mount Kenya where Njiru lives, he starts harvesting. With its high elevation, the region is ideal for growing coffee – as Njiru does.

During harvest season, Njiru invites his family to join him in picking the ripe coffee cherries. They work together and break to eat together – reflecting their value of reciprocity and community. 

That same ethic of care extends to how Njiru treats the land.

Around 3 PM, he takes the harvested coffee to a local factory, where it’s weighed in exchange for a receipt detailing his daily earnings. 

Njiru grew up surrounded by coffee. Both of his parents were coffee farmers – earning their living from one of Kenya’s most widely exported cash crops, providing livelihoods for some 800,000 families.

In 2010, when Njiru decided to start growing coffee himself, he initially harvested about a ton of coffee per season from his 700 trees.

He began farming like his parents did, by growing coffee and nothing else.

But producing high-quality coffee isn’t as simple as it once was. Even as global coffee consumption is at an all-time high, the climate crisis has made weather patterns less predictable, and land degradation is impacting up to two-thirds of Africa’s productive land area.

How Kenyan coffee farmers are adapting to a changing climate

In neighboring Ethiopia, Denu Lemma Tsegaye, the Rainforest Alliance’s country director, asked coffee farmers how the warming climate is impacting coffee farms. They told him: “coffee is climbing up the mountain.” 

Coffee needs cool conditions to grow. As the climate warms, some coffee growers are being forced to either move to higher elevations to continue to produce high-quality coffee or adapt their methods.

Njiru chose to adapt.

He joined the New Ngariama Farmers Cooperative Society, an alliance that helps some 800 small-scale farmers in Kenya grow, sell and profit from their coffee farms. 

In 2015, he and his fellow cooperative members joined a training led by the Rainforest Alliance to learn about regenerative coffee farming practices.

He learned the benefits of pruning trees every few years to help rejuvenate new growth and make crops more resilient to pests. He also learned the advantages of intercropping coffee trees with other plants, such as avocado and bluegrass, to diversify microorganisms in the soil and attract more pollinators.

“Coffee is a tree that loves other trees,” says Tsegaye. “You need to have a certain level of tree cover to have good-quality coffee.”

Since receiving his training and becoming certified with the Rainforest Alliance, Njiru has implemented agroforestry on his farm. He now grows plentiful avocados, which give him an additional stream of income and provide shade to keep his coffee trees cool in heatwaves. 

He has also adopted new varieties of coffee trees that are more resistant to diseases.

“Culturally, people used to use a lot of chemicals,” he says. “For certain coffee varieties, you have to use chemicals for them to survive.” This was especially true near Mount Kenya, where coffee berry disease is prevalent. 

Njiru also uses the manure from his cows to naturally fertilize the soil and prunes his trees to make them more naturally resilient to pests, eliminating the need for fungicides. 

“Our production is going higher because we are introducing better methods of agroforestry,” he says, “so even when temperatures are very high, the coffee can still survive.” 

“We are more knowledgeable now, more informed than our fathers.”

How Rainforest Alliance certification boosts yields

Just three years after receiving his training and certification from the Rainforest Alliance, Njiru now harvests three to four tons of coffee per season – a more than 200-percent increase in productivity. 

He also receives higher earnings for selling his coffee, as the Rainforest Alliance makes a mandatory cash payment to certified farmers in exchange for selling their coffee at higher than market prices. This not only ensures healthier ecosystems but also supports local livelihoods and improves working conditions. 

“Within Ethiopia, coffee exporters get a larger percentage of the profits, but in our certification program, we ask exporters to evenly distribute those premiums received for certified coffee,” Tsegaye tells us. 

“Part of our sustainability program is to address this uneven distribution of benefits for all actors along the supply chain.” 

At a minimum, the extra income covers certification and audit costs. But according to Tsegaye, it offers significant long-term benefits – both financial and environmental – for smallholder farmers.

Certification models vary across East Africa and globally. For larger farms, certification emphasizes integrated pest management and fair labor. For smallholders, the focus is often on collecting accurate data and improving yields.

Tsegaye acknowledges that using organic fertilizers may result in lower short-term yields but says it’s a worthwhile trade-off to protect the environment and preserve the region’s reputation for quality coffee.

The Rainforest Alliance also hosts free training sessions, such as the one Njiru attended, to share knowledge on a variety of climate-smart growing techniques such as planting shade trees, planting ground cover crops to retain moisture, and weeding by hand to reduce the need for pesticides. 

Reversing land degradation through coffee

Despite these positive results, Njiru admits that “change takes time.”

While young generations of coffee farmers adopt change more easily, others are more resistant to adopting new methods, especially as it takes several years to note a positive difference in production and recoup the initial investment.

“Sustainability is a journey of continuous improvement,” says Tsegaye. 

Karugu Macharia, a member of the Mount Kenya Landscape Management Board, agrees with both Tsegaye and Njiru on the importance of healing land and reversing land degradation by enriching the soil.

Macharia works to conserve the Mount Kenya area and share the benefits of the Rainforest Alliance certification process, both for the health of local economies and for the longevity of high-quality coffee farms.

“When we are talking about the conservation of our soils, you have minimal tillage and climate-smart agriculture,” said Macharia. “You need good cover crops to ensure you are suppressing weeds, and at the same time ensuring that your soil maintains a lot of moisture.”

Historically, land degradation in East Africa has been driven in part by large-scale monoculture coffee farming – a system introduced during British colonial rule.

Though the knowledge and teaching are new, Macharia nods to the simplicity of it all.

“We are more or less going back to where we started.”