By Susan Clotfelter
The Denver Post
The Denver Post
May 27, 2012
 |
| Sarada Krishnan, director of horticulture at the
Denver Botanic Gardens, holds coffee tree leaves she collected recently from a trip to South Sudan to study the DNA of the plants.(Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post) |
Coffee didn't alter the
direction of Sarada Krishnan's life. It merely flowed through it.
She was a year into her
Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focusing on Prunus africana,
an endangered tree in Madagascar. After a year of toil reviewing all the
previous research, she found out the grant she'd been hoping would fund her
project had been given to another scholar.
"I was
devastated," she said. "After a year of working on it, I had to
completely start over."
She opened a book, and a
photograph fell out. It showed her late father, standing in the trees of her
family's coffee plantation in the Wynad district of Kerala, an Indian state.
"I thought, 'Oh!
Maybe I should work on coffee.' And it turned out there was a need for coffee
research in Madagascar."
The liquid fuel that
kick-starts so many mornings across the globe is anything but simple in horticulture, in
commerce, in ethics. Coffee is the world's second-most widely traded commodity
(oil is No. 1). It provides a living for 75 million people. The coffee fruit,
whose "beans" are actually seeds, grows on trees in the subtropical
mountains of Jamaica, Haiti, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Kenya — 80 countries in
all.
Preserving the genes of
those coffee trees is what drives Krishnan, the Denver Botanic Gardens' horticulture director.
And it drives her at 80 or 90 miles an hour. She talks fast, the words, big
technical ones, tumbling out. Since powering through that bump on the way to
her doctorate, she has bought two coffee plantations in Jamaica and is
part-owner of a third; she'd like to use one of them for coffee research. She's
consulted on efforts to revitalize the coffee industry in Haiti. She's waiting
for her importer's license and certification to come through. She's divorced with
two sons, Vinay, 19, and Vilok, 16.
Her favorite brew?
Jamaican Blue Mountain,. Her drink at Starbucks? A triple-shot latte. "I
do sugar and milk, which is sacrilege to real coffee experts. Sugar is bad
enough, but milk! But that's how I grew up drinking it. And I started at 7 or 8
years old."
She drinks coffee. She
farms coffee. She studies coffee. "For me, having the production side is
beneficial to the scientific side and vice versa," she says.
Her involvement in
coffee research is part of the botanic gardens' Center for Global Initiatives,
a conceptual umbrella that also covers staff expeditions to study native plants
in places like South America and Mongolia. It fits with the gardens' mission of
having its scientists make an impact on both global and local levels.
It fits with her own DNA.
"You know, my father was a businessman," she says. "But he
really loved plants."
With coffee, there's
a lot to study. As with wine, nobody really knows what makes coffee
from different regions taste different, she says. "There are 58 different
species of coffee plant. Some of them are low in caffeine or have no caffeine.
And you never know what genetic material is going to be valuable."
Coffea arabica, for example, is predominantly
self-pollinating. Its seeds have less caffeine, and it yields the smooth flavor
most coffee lovers seek. But precisely because it self-pollinates, it has low
genetic diversity.Coffea canephoraproduces what's known as robusta
coffee, higher in caffeine and more bitter and mainly used for less-expensive
blends. It grows at lower altitudes and is more disease- and pest-resistant.
But robusta has to be cross-pollinated, requiring the help of seasonal rains or
insects.
Coffee trees take five
years to reach full production. If currently unknown wild coffee genes
disappear because of climate change, or development pressures, or the kinds of
civil wars or mere unrest that make tree farming impossible, they're gone
forever. It's this threat of lost genetic potential that haunts botanists and
motivates conservation fieldwork.
That's why Krishnan and
a handful of other scientists, some South Sudanese scholars and some porters
and guides found themselves tramping
through the country's mountains last month in the last days before the rainy
season. The trip was funded by the U.S. Agency for International
Development and involved the Norman Borlaug
Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University;
England's Royal
Botanic Gardens; and several coffee trade and research organizations.
South Sudan's Boma Plateau
sits across a valley from Ethiopia, the birthplace of arabica coffee. From
their camp in a dusty village named Jonglai, where fat, juicy mangoes
continually dropped from huge old trees,Krishnan
and her cohorts hiked the mountain forests for five daysin search of
wild coffee. They were guided by a botanical survey from the 1940s that had
found flourishing populations.
Seven decades later,
they found only one full-grown tree and clusters of seedlings — a significant
deterioration.
Krishnan and her
colleagues marked 75 seedlings with aluminum tags, recording their GPS
coordinates and collecting their leaves for DNA analysis back in Denver.
On the last day of their
week in the Boma forest, they met Kaiwa, a 70-year-old woman who said she knew
of a stand of coffee trees a few mountains away. She offered to climb with them
to show them.
"That climb was so
steep," Krishnan says, "I almost fell off a cliff. Two people grabbed
my arms and pulled me up."
But Kaiwa's stand of
trees was too far for the team to reach in a single day's hike. They'll have to
hope to return to it on a follow-up expedition in November or December; hope that
South
Sudan's newly won independence takes root; hope that border battles
with Sudan over oilfields and pipelines don't spread to the rest of the
country.
All this for a harvest
that can be held in the crook of Krishnan's elbow, a gallon Ziploc full of
sample bags stuffed with white crystals and shards of green leaves.
A bag that was lost for
two nights with Krishnan's checked luggage.
"I thought, 'Oh,
no, the point of the whole trip, and all the thousands of dollars!' But I
checked it because I didn't want to have to explain that white powder to three
different sets of customs officials."
British Airways found
Krishnan's luggage, and the studies are now underway. Krishnan is extracting
the DNA, then sending it to a Nevada lab for amplification. The lab will return
to Krishnan a genetic fingerprint for each sampled plant.
The goals of
establishing a living coffee-gene preserve in the South Sudan, of helping the
fledgling nation's economy, will take decades to fulfill. Already, though, the
trip has produced the first documentation of one wild coffee species in the
South Sudan. Ethiopian scientists are now expected to join in the project.
Krishnan's cup runneth
over.
"Botanical
fieldwork is not easy," she said. "By the fourth day, I was asking
myself, 'Why am I doing this?' But six months later, I'm always ready to go
again."
---
Susan Clotfelter:
303-954-1078 or sclotfelter@denverpost.com