Volcafe joins Cool Farm Alliance

Coffee trader Volcafe has joined the Cool Farm Alliance as part of the Swiss company’s efforts to assess and reduce the environmental footprint of farms in its value chains across 15 origin countries.

The Cool Farm Alliance is the membership organisation behind the widely recognised Cool Farm Tool, an online calculator that assesses the greenhouse gas, water, and biodiversity impacts of farming. Through this new partnership, Volcafe and the coffee farmers it works with will be able to use the Cool Farm Tool to examine the footprints of farming value chains across origins as diverse as Brazil, Honduras, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, and Vietnam.

For farmers, the Cool Farm Tool simplifies the process by which they can conduct otherwise challenging calculations about water usage, carbon sequestration, or biodiversity management. The tool also helps farmers choose practices that improve environmental performance, while allowing them to track and measure these improvements over time. For Volcafe, this service will be an important addition to the toolkit offered by our Volcafe Way farmer support programme, which provides training and technical advice on sustainable agricultural and business practices to tens of thousands of coffee farmers.

‘After a successful pilot run in Colombia, Volcafe is thrilled to bring all its coffee origin operations into the Cool Farm Alliance,’ says Carlos Ortiz, sustainability manager and climate lead at Volcafe. ‘We hope the tool will support not only our company, but also the farmers we work with. Volcafe and its coffee producer and roaster partners all stand to benefit from the rich data and environmental diagnoses that the Cool Farm Tool enables, as well as the actions that will be taken as a result.’

‘We’re delighted to welcome Volcafe to the Cool Farm Alliance community,’ says Daniella Malin, Head of Impact and Collaboration at the Cool Farm Alliance. ‘This is especially timely as the Cool Farm Tool has been investing in improving the GHG and carbon sequestration modelling in perennial cropping system over the past year and will continue this into the coming years. We look forward to a robust partnership with Volcafe to build out these features to better serve both companies and farmers.’

Volcafe’s engagement with the Cool Farm Alliance is part of the company’s broader efforts to fulfil its new Sustainability Strategy, launched in 2021 with one of the three strategic pillars focused on combatting climate change through regenerative practices in coffee farming. While the Cool Farm Tool will help assess farm-level emissions, Volcafe is also partnering with dss+ to assess the company’s own emissions and plan for net zero. Through a partnership with CATIE, Volcafe is working to extend agroforestry good practices to coffee farms across its supplier network, boosting carbon capture and promoting biodiversity in the process.

About Volcafe

Established in 1851, Volcafe is one of the world’s largest coffee merchants, specialising in worldwide green coffee procurement, processing in origin countries and distribution to roaster partners. Volcafe provides access to all the major coffee producing origins and supplies beans for over 80 billion cups a year.

About Cool Farm Alliance

Cool Farm Alliance is an industry platform for sustainable agriculture metric development and use. It seeks to enable millions of growers globally to make more informed on-farm decisions that reduce their environmental impact.