Coffee growers gave up the strip of land beside the river
Fourteen smallholders agreed to pull their coffee back from the Hemavathi and let us replant a 20-metre buffer of native trees along 6km of bank.
Coffee grown right down to the water silts up the river and bakes in the afternoon sun with no canopy to shade it. The fourteen smallholders along this 6km stretch of the Hemavathi were losing their riverside rows to erosion anyway, watching the bank slide into the water a little more each monsoon.
The deal we offered was straightforward. Pull the coffee back 20 metres from the water and let us replant that strip with native trees, and in exchange we would supply shade-tree seedlings for the rest of each grower's plot. Shade-grown coffee fetches a better price and copes better with heat, so the growers come out ahead on the part of the land they keep.
It is a trade, not a donation, and we say that plainly. The growers are not doing us a favour. They are giving up land that was failing them anyway in return for trees that improve the land they keep, and we are getting a 20-metre riparian buffer along 6km of bank.
Working out the boundary took longer than the planting will. Twenty metres sounds simple until you are standing on a slope arguing about where the old high-water mark really is. We walked every plot with the growers rather than imposing a line from a map.
The buffer does several things at once. It shades and cools the water for the fish and the frogs, it filters the run-off that used to carry soil and coffee chemicals straight into the river, and its roots hold the bank that has been collapsing each year.
These are the same growers around Kodagu whose shade trees have brought back tigers and the long-lost shrub frog on the buffer land further up. The riverbank is the next piece of the same slow stitching-together of the valley.
