Coffee is an Australian obsession.
Six billion cups of it are consumed every year.
Australia’s taste for coffee was even lampooned in the recent Hollywood rom-com Anyone But You, which was partially filmed in Australia.
Despite the demand, the reality is that of the 6 billion cups we drink annually, less than 1 per cent of the beans used are homegrown.
There are only about 50 growers in the country and they are found around northern New South Wales, south-east Queensland and tropical north Queensland.
“In comparison, the Australian industry is tiny, whereas globally it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry,” Southern Cross University (SCU) researcher Tobias Kretzschmar said.
The domestic industry, relatively unknown compared to big players like Brazil and Vietnam, has been around for decades.
Australia is also considered a safe haven to grow coffee because it is free of pests and disease, which means “we don’t need pesticides and have a clean product”, Professor Kretzschmar said.
“Internationally, coffee is on the decline … coffee rust is a fungal disease and it’s probably the main threat to coffee globally,” he said.
“We’re the only coffee growing country that is disease-free, to my knowledge, and we also don’t have coffee berry borer, which is a pest that causes yield declines already in neighbouring Papua New Guinea.”
Problems of the past and present
To grow more coffee here there are several challenges, ranging from the type of trees we have — to a rampant national problem — a lack of affordable real estate.
Rebecca Zentveld is the president of the Australian Grown Coffee Association and has run a coffee farm for three decades.
“The industry had a real growth spurt in the 80s and 90s and then it levelled off, with not as many growers joining us in the last 20 years,” Ms Zentveld told 7.30.
“I would really say that’s because of the price of land where we are growing coffee. This beautiful hinterland of Byron Bay, it’s where people want to live … rather than growing trees and being food farmers.”
Developing countries also have significantly cheaper production and labour costs, yet overseas competition is not the biggest challenge for many local farmers.
When the industry took off here in the 80s, a coffee tree chosen for commercial distribution was a Kenyan varietal called the K7, because it suited the Australian climate and produced quality beans.
“When the original trials were done with the Department of Agriculture, they only did that for five years, so the trees were about a metre high,” Ms Zentveld said.
“What we didn’t know was how vigorous the K7 varietal would be … they just keep growing.”
Once they have been in the soil for more than five years, the K7’s height becomes an issue, because they get too large to fit through the harvesting machine.
“Our biggest cost as a farmer is ongoing pruning, trimming those trees, and then that causes a loss of production for up to three years before you get another crop,” Ms Zentveld said.
SCU has teamed up with industry to find a solution.
Over the past five years researchers have been trialling dozens of different coffee trees in Australia’s climate and have narrowed it down to three varietals found in Central and South America.
One reason these three coffee trees were selected was because they are semi-dwarves.
“Semi-dwarves stop growing at a height of around 2.5 to 3 metres … they stay at a size that can be machine harvested in perpetuity,” Professor Kretzschmar said.
“People coming to see the tall varietals that need lots of maintenance are put off … they want something that works, and I think we have that.”
The university also engaged 15 trained professionals, known as Q graders, to identify high-grade coffee.
The K7 and three new coffee trees all scored as specialty coffee, which is the highest category.
Another benefit of the semi-dwarves chosen is they are open-source, meaning there are no royalty costs.
Seedlings have already been distributed to growers across Australia.
A chance to finally meet the demand
The Whitney family has been farming near Nimbin, NSW, for three generations but only started growing coffee about five years ago.
“I wasn’t even a coffee drinker. I was a teetotaller up until the time we bought the farm,” Owen Whitney from Mountain Top Coffee said.
“It’s been a real eye-opener to taste good coffee, enjoy it and see where we can take the farm.”
He is trialling 2,000 of the semi-dwarves and intends to plant them in spring this year.
“It’s good to have something new. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket,” he said.
“If they don’t work out, the K7s have proved themselves and are earning the money, so there is always something to fall back on.”
Ms Zentveld believes the new options will give confidence to existing growers and encourage new growers to enter the industry.
“Having the smaller varieties means we will be able to harvest every year and we won’t have that loss of production for three years while you prune,” she said.
“We’ve never been able to meet the demand for Australian coffee.”
Ben Liu, a food chemist working with the team at SCU, hopes these new varietals will take the industry to new heights.
He has tried more than 2,000 coffee varieties and believes the nation has the goods to put coffee grown here on the map.
“I really want people to know Australia can grow very good coffee, just like Australian wine,” Dr Liu said.
“I want people when they go to a coffee shop to ask, ‘Do you have Australian-grown coffee?'”
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV
