How coffee agroforests can play a role in ecological restoration

To find suitable plants to grow alongside organic coffee, he began scouting for the best-priced plant sources, including the Karnataka Forest Department’s nurseries and seed suppliers in Chikkaballapur. During his search, Shetty discovered that the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) had been actively restoring rainforests in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, for years, and so he reached out to them. “They were amazed at the scale with which I was thinking of starting nurseries and asked me what species I was working on.” So he shared with them the list of trees and seeds available with both the Forest Department and the seed supplier. “The botanist looked at it and said, a week later, that only three of these species are native to the Western Ghats,” he says. “That shook me. I realised that we are just planting trees for the sake of planting trees, but we are completely messing up the ecosystem.”