THE coffee-berry borer is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500m-worth of unpicked coffee beans a year, thus diminishing the incomes of some 20m farmers. The borer spends most of its life as a larva, buried inside a coffee berry, feeding on the beans within. To do so, it has to defy the toxic effects of caffeine. This is a substance which, though pleasing to people, is fatal to insects—except, for reasons hitherto unknown, to the coffee-berry borer. But those reasons are unknown no longer. A team of researchers led by Eoin Brodie of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fernando Vega of the United States Department of Agriculture had a suspicion the answer lay not with the beetle itself, but with the bacteria in its gut. As they outline in Nature Communications, that suspicion has proved correct.

The team’s hypothesis was that the borer’s gut bacteria are shielding it by eating any caffeine it has ingested before the poison can be absorbed through the insect’s gut wall. Experiments on a laboratory-reared strain of the borer suggested this hypothesis was probably true. Initially, the larvae’s droppings were caffeine-free. When the lab-reared insects were dosed with antibiotics, this and Dr Vega turned to wild beetles. They collected samples from seven coffee-growing countries and combed through the insects’ gut floras, looking for features in common. By constructing what was, in effect, a Venn diagram of microbes from these populations, and also those from their lab-bred strain, they were able to focus on the bacterial species found in all of them.

They tried growing each of these on a medium whose only source of carbon and nitrogen for metabolism was caffeine. Some of the bugs were able to survive on this diet, others were not. Of the survivors, the most abundant in beetle guts was Pseudomonas fulva. This species, a genetic analysis showed, is blessed with an enzyme called caffeine demethylase, which converts caffeine into something that can be dealt with by normal metabolic enzymes.

Kill P. fulva, then, and you would probably kill the borer. But that is easier said than done. Even if spraying coffee plantations with antibiotics were feasible and would do the job (by no means certain, for the larvae would have to ingest sufficient antibiotic for the purpose), it would be undesirable. The profligate use of antibiotics encourages resistance, thus making them less effective for saving human lives.

There might, though, be another way of getting at P. fulva. This would be to craft a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, specific to the bug—an approach already being investigated for the treatment of human illness caused by a different species ofPseudomonas.

In practice, more than one type of phage would probably be needed, for if P. fulva were knocked out, another caffeine-consuming bacterium in the beetle’s gut might end up replacing it. But, regardless of the details, this study has introduced a novel way of thinking about pest control. Many plants use poisons to protect themselves from insects. Sometimes, such plants are crops. Being able to circumvent these natural insecticides is an important part of becoming abundant enough to constitute a pest. It is possible other agronomists who have been seeking to understand how critters do this have been looking in the wrong place—ie, at the critters themselves, rather than among the bacteria in their guts.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21657765-novel-approach-pest-control-beetles-and-bugs?fsrc=nlw%7Cnewe%7C20-07-2015

Nitrogen: 2.28 percent
Phosphorus: 0.06 percent
Potassium: 0.6 percent

Available nutrient levels: The pH or reaction of the coffee grounds is considered slightly acidic and in a favorable range at 6.2 on the pH scale.

Salinity (ECe) is a measurement of total soluble salts and is considered slightly elevated at 3.7 dS/m. The primary water-soluble salts in this product are potassium, magnesium, sodium and chloride. The potentially problematic ions in sodium and chloride are each sufficiently low as to be inconsequential in terms of creating problems for plants.

The availabilities of nitrogen, calcium, zinc, manganese and iron are quite low and in some cases deficient. Thus, the coffee grounds will not supply appreciable amounts of these essential plant elements when used as a mineral soil amendment.

However, the availabilities of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper are each sufficiently high that there will be a very positive impact on improving availabilities of these elements where the coffee grounds are used as a mineral soil amendment. The coffee grounds will negate the need for additional sources of phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper when blended with mineral soils.

In summary, the available plant essential elements which will be substantially improved where the coffee grounds are used as a soil amendment, include phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper.

Total nutrient levels: Each cubic yard of these coffee grounds contains a total of 10.31 lbs. nitrogen, of which 0.01 lb. (0.09%) are available. Thus, even though available nitrogen is considered deficient in this product, there still remains over 10 lbs. of total nitrogen per cubic yard of coffee grounds. Thus, nitrogen is primarily bound in the organic fraction and is unavailable to plants until soil microorganisms degrade the organic fraction. Through this process, the nitrogen is converted to plant available forms. Over the long term the coffee grounds will act like a slow release fertilizer providing long-term nitrogen input which can then be utilized by plants.

Nearly all potassium and all magnesium are in the available forms. This means that immediate availability improvements for these two elements will take place when the coffee grounds are blended with mineral soils. About half of the copper and calcium are in their immediately available forms.

All other plant essential elements are primarily bound in the organic fraction and will thus be subject to slow release over time as soil microbes continue to degrade the organic fraction.

Physical properties: Virtually all particles passed the 1 millimeter (mm) screen resulting in a product which is very fine textured. Each cubic yard of the coffee grounds will supply an excellent amount of organic matter, measured at 442 lbs. organic matter per cubic yard. At the use rates indicated in this report, the input of organic matter will be substantial and will result in considerable short-term and long-term improvement of mineral soil structure.

Carbon/nitrogen ratio: On the basis of dry matter bulk density (452 lbs. per cubic yard), organic matter content (97.7%) and total nitrogen (2.28%), the estimated carbon/nitrogen ratio is about 24:1. This means that there is more than sufficient nitrogen present in the coffee grounds to provide for the nitrogen demand of the soil microorganisms as they degrade the organic fraction.

Use rate: Based on the overall chemistry and physical properties of the coffee grounds, they can be utilized at rates similar to other organic amendments when used in amending mineral soils. These data indicate that 25-35 percent by volume coffee grounds can be blended with mineral soils of any type to improve structure of those soils.

Hundreds of farmers in Tanzania are abandoning crops of coffee and cotton due to changes in the local climate. Instead, they’re planting more lucrative vegetables and flowers as temperatures rise and rainfall becomes less predictable.

“Coffee beans are no longer as profitable, as my harvests keep on falling,” Ludovick Meela, a farmer from Tanzania’s northern Kilimanjaro region, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Reuters news organization. “I need fast-growing crops I can sell for a quick income.”

The strain to Tanzania’s cash crops is the latest sign that climate change is altering how and where food is produced around the world. In Honduras, banana farmers are seeing yields decline amid fierce cold snaps and erratic rain patterns. India’s wheat and rice crops are suffering from hotter weather, and in the U.S. West, enduring drought has caused the beef-cattle herd to shrink to its lowest level in more than 60 years.

Climate change is also exacerbating a water scarcity challenge in the U.S. and globally. About 80 percent of the world’s freshwater resources are used to produce food, by some estimates, but drought, irregular rainfall and warmer surface temperatures are threatening to diminish those supplies. “Agriculture and food production as we know it in the United States is at risk, perhaps at far greater risk than we realize,” Jay Famiglietti, a senior water-cycle scientist at NASA, told reporters earlier this month.

In Tanzania, scientists have attributed the drop in arabica coffee yields to a rise in nighttime temperatures in recent decades.

Since 1966, the country’s coffee production has fallen by 46 percent, a trend expected to continue this century. Over that same period, Tanzania’s nighttime average temperature has ticked up by 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a recent study by South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand. The researchers estimated that for each 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) rise in the mean minimum temperature, coffee farmers were likely to lose around 137 kilograms (300 pounds) of coffee per hectare (2.5 acres) annually.

Tanzania’s declining coffee output has a limited impact on the world’s supply of the caffeine-rich beans — the country produces less than 1 percent of arabica coffee worldwide, according to Tanzania’s Coffee Board. But the regional economy could suffer significantly if coffee production falls further, observers say. The industry employs about 2.4 million people in Tanzania and millions more in neighboring countries in East Africa. “The effects to livelihoods and jobs will be huge,” Haji Semboja, an economics professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, told Reuters in April.

The declining trend is pushing Meela and other farmers in Tanzania to cultivate other types of crops — such as cabbage, onions, lettuce and potatoes — and to keep dairy cattle. Meela said he believes these are a better investment of his time and money than climate-threatened coffee, the Reuters foundation reported Monday.

“When my children were growing up, coffee was everything to me,” he told the news organization. “I got a lot of income from it, which enabled me to gain economically, but all that is history.”

March 18 (Reuters) – An unprecedented drought reduced 2014 coffee production in Brazil, the world’s biggest grower, and stunted tree branch growth for the upcoming 2015/16 crop.

German coffee trader Neumann forecast in a March report that Brazil will harvest 45.3 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the harvest that will start in May, according to traders who saw the report.

This is up from its August forecast of 45 million bags. In the August report, it said Brazil’s 2014/15 crop was 47.7 million bags.

This is the lowest in a range of estimates gathered from trade houses since late December, with the highest at 49.5 million bags, estimated in February by Volcafe, the closely watched Swiss-based coffee division of commodities house ED&F Man.

Swiss-based trade house Ecom shaved its forecast slightly in a presentation to clients last week, estimating that Brazil would produce about 49 million 60-kg bags, with roughly 32 million arabica and 17 million robusta.

This was down slightly from its December estimate of 50 million bags.