Coffee
Arabica coffee is a highland tree of the tropics: it wants steady warmth without heat, a wet growing season, and altitude to cool the nights. That narrow recipe pins it to a belt of mountains between the tropics — the reason your cup traces back to Brazil, Colombia, the Ethiopian highlands and the hills of Vietnam.
How it grows
Coffee grows on a woody shrub, its fruit held above the ground.
What it’s worth to grow
Farm-gate value = the price farmers are paid per kilogram (FAOSTAT producer prices, median of 143 positive country-year observations spanning 2018–2024). It tracks how costly and labour-intensive a crop is to grow — almonds and vanilla command a premium; potatoes and cereals are cheap staples.
Where Earth's climate suits coffee
Climatic suitability only — scored for every 0.5° of the planet from this crop's temperature and rainfall tolerances (FAO EcoCrop) on AgroClim 1991–2025 normals (AgERA5 temperature, CHIRPS/ERA5 rainfall). It shows where the rain-fed climate permits the crop, not where it is grown today; irrigation lets many crops thrive in drier country than the map suggests (California, Egypt, the Indus and Nile).
Who grows it — and where the climate merely allows it
The climate where it grows
— mean monthly temperature ▍ monthly rainfall — averaged over the actual growing areas (the suitable cells) inside each country, so it reflects where the crop is really grown, not the national average. AgroClim 1991–2025 normals. The 🌧 badge is the last 3 months’ rainfall as a percentage of the 1991–2020 CHIRPS normal (through 2025-12) — the current drought/deluge signal.
Climate envelope · FAO EcoCrop
Deep bar = optimal range; pale bar = absolute tolerance. Beyond the pale bar the crop fails. Latitude tolerance ±27° · soil pH 4.3–8.4.
Growing calendar & hazards
In the tropics coffee flowers with the first rains and ripens its cherries over 7–11 months, so harvest falls in the dry months — roughly May–September north of the equator and April–August in Brazil. At the equator, where seasons blur, a tree can carry flowers and ripe cherries at once.
- Frost. A single hard frost scorches the leaves and can kill young trees — the 1975 and 2021 Brazilian frosts each spiked world prices.
- Heat & drought. Above ~30°C flowering falters and cherries ripen unevenly; a failed rainy season aborts the crop.
- Warming. Arabica's cool-highland niche is shifting upslope; studies project a large fall in suitable land by 2050 as the belt migrates to higher, cooler ground.