Sure, a cup of California-grown coffee sells for about $18 a cup, but people are buying it.
In most coffee shops, you can choose a cup of joe brewed with beans from countries like Ethiopia, Colombia, Costa Rica and Yemen. Now, a new crop of coffee growers is working to get coffee brewed from California-grown beans included on those menus.
When Mark Gaskell moved to California after working in coffee-growing regions in Central America, he noticed coffee plants growing in gardens and wondered if large-scale production was an option.
In 2001, Gaskell, farm advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension, established transplants and discovered that the sub-tropical plants could thrive in the Golden State. He recruited Jay Ruskey of Good Land Organics to help with trials, hoping coffee could be a valuable niche crop to help sustain small farms.
Ruskey started growing coffee in 2002 on his Santa Barbara, Calif., farm and quickly became a passionate coffee farmer.
“We learned that we had the ability to grow very good coffee with a very unique flavor,” Ruskey explains. “There is a misconception that you can’t grow coffee outside the Tropic of Cancer.”
Local farmers embraced the idea of California coffee and started planting their own crops. The burgeoning state industry now boasts 30 farms growing more than 30,000 coffee trees, according to the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
At least two dozen more farms are expected to begin growing coffee in 2018.
Although coffee farms are scattered throughout California, the biggest concentrations are in Santa Barbara and San Diego counties. Most of the farms are fewer than five years old and their beans are just starting to mature. As that happens, Gaskell expects production to double year over year.
“The California coffee industry is growing very quickly,” he says.
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