The nursery of our NKG sister company Becamo has received Silver Level Certification from World Coffee Research (WCR).
According to WCR, farmers who plant the wrong variety of trees for their fields or soil — whether knowingly, or because a plant or seed wasn’t what they believed it was — can face reduced productivity for 30 or more years.
The Silver Level distinction means that Becamo’s nursery operates with ever-improving agricultural practices and implements efficient management systems to ensure robust traceability and genetic purity of the seeds and seedlings. Specifically, during its first cycle of 400,000 plants, 85 to 99.9 percent of its crop was compliant with DNA analysis and traceability mass-balance audits to ensure genetic purity and conformity.
WCR Verified Means Dependability
WCR Verified is the first global standard to certify that coffee seed producers and nurseries are producing healthy, genetically traceable and pure plants for specific varieties.
Most major crops in the world have seed certification programs that guarantee that when a farmer purchases seeds or seedlings, they’re definitely receiving plants of the genetic variety that’s advertised, free of disease and pests. Coffee has been the exception to this practice, until now. WCR Verified is designed to provide science-based assurance at the root of the coffee supply chain through an independent third-party certifier, NSF International.
This is an important step for the industry. It empowers coffee farmers to make intentional (and accurate) choices about what to plant and cultivate, and it ensures that their investment will perform as expected, reducing risk and increasing profitability.
Hanna Neuschwander, director of Strategic Communications at WCR, explains:
When it’s time to plant a new tree, many farmers don’t have access to high-quality planting material. Low-quality plants “lock in” reduced performance over the entire lifetime of the tree. At the same time, the consequences of having the wrong variety—for example one that is not resistant to a key disease in the farmers’ region—can be disastrous. Because coffee is a tree crop that remains in farmers’ fields for 20 to 50 years, having low-quality or improper varieties can amount to huge lifetime reductions in productivity, profitability and climate resilience.
Today, much of the genetic gain created by breeders via improved varieties is “leaking out” of the value stream before it has a chance to reach farmers. Increasing the quality of planting material allows the potential of coffee varieties to be unleashed. It “de-risks” the investment farmers make in planting new trees, improving farmer livelihoods and contributing to enhanced country competitiveness and origin diversity.
WCR Verified clearly provides significant value to producers. But it also benefits coffee traders and buyers by strengthening supply-chain stability and increasing dialogue with farmers around production quality. The program is also a boon to the industry as a whole, creating greater transparency in the supply chain and enabling a new standard for consistency. The access to knowledge — as well as the inputs themselves — means local farmers have agency to make agricultural decisions that will have lasting economic impact.
The leaf of a plant believed to be resistant to roya, clearly displaying signs of a major infection. (Photo by WCR.)
Additionally, this certification brings even more integrity to the work that Becamo is doing in Honduras. Its commitment to the coffee-producing community is long standing and far reaching. Recuperando mi Cafetal, or Recovering My Coffee Plantation (founded in 2015) is now being folded into the larger NKG Bloom initiative, expanding its impact across the country. Becamo’s work continues to implement the holistic approach reflected by WCR Verified, including reforestation projects, technical assistance and financial services.
