The rootstock of a coffee plant can live for 20 to 30 years. In that time, a generation, it will have good years and bad years, years where it bears large quantities of fruit and years where it fails to produce as expected.
This cycle, called “alternate bearing,” has troubled farmers for millennia. Gabriela Garcia and Laura Kuhl, two Northeastern University researchers, wanted to know how farmers’ management strategies dealt with the issue of alternate bearing, especially on small, single-family farms, called smallholdings.
There are “basically no studies that have looked at the social dimensions of alternate bearing, how farmers conceptualize it and its underlying drivers,” says Garcia, an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences with a co-appointment in the school of public policy and urban affairs. Garcia and Kuhl’s recent research is changing that.
