Happy Wednesday {{first name | my friend}},

The ECL community’s passion for regenerative and biodynamic farming keeps appearing in reader replies. It’s a topic I’ve worked to raise awareness about for 10+ years…and one reason my wife and I are obsessed with Purity Coffee and proud to share their story. So I asked founder Andrew Salisbury my top 5 questions to dig into what's really happening on conventional coffee farms… so you know what to look for (which applies to far more than coffee).

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How is this not a creature from a fantasy fiction film? With big eyes and a droopy nose that resembles a short elephant trunk, the saiga antelope has one of the strangest faces of Central Asia. The odd nose is built to filter dust in the dry summer heat and warms the freezing air in winter before it reaches their lungs. These creatures are true Ice Age survivors, roaming the same open grasslands where they once grazed alongside woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats.

Not too long ago, it looked like their long existence could be in jeopardy. Heavy poaching and a devastating disease outbreak in 2015 pushed the saiga to the brink, crashing the population to a fraction of what it was. But thanks to hunting bans, anti-poaching patrols, and steady conservation work, their numbers have climbed back into the millions. In 2023 they were moved off the critically endangered list, making it one of the more hopeful comeback stories in the animal world.

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ANDROGRAPHIS: A bitter herb used in traditional medicine to support immunity, reduce inflammation, and fight upper respiratory infections. It’s sometimes called “Indian echinacea.” Learn more from my friend Dr. Axe HERE.

1. Coffee is one of the most chemically treated crops on the planet. What's happening on a conventional coffee farm that most drinkers have no idea about?

Conventional coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world: synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and chemical fertilizers applied over and over through the season. What's striking is that many of these chemicals are banned in the countries that drink the coffee, but they're still used where it's grown. And beyond what may end up in your cup, the bigger story is what it does to the land and the people: soil stripped of its natural life, waterways contaminated, farmworkers exposed with little protection.

Most of this is a consequence of how the coffee is grown. When you clear the forest and plant coffee in full sun as a monoculture, which is how most of the world's coffee is now produced, nature stops doing the work for you, so you have to replace it with chemicals just to keep the plants alive. Most people picture a pristine mountainside. The reality on a lot of farms looks a lot more like industrial agriculture.

2. In 2022 you bought your own farm in Colombia. What are you doing to that soil that a typical producer isn't, and what have you seen change?

We bought Montebonito because we realized that to truly control health and quality, we had to own the first mile: the farm itself. When you own the land, 100% of the decisions can be made in the interest of health instead of yield.

It's worth being clear about where the health benefits actually come from, because this is where most of the conversation stops too early. The low bar, the starting point, is avoiding the bad stuff: making sure the coffee is organic, without mold, and tested for mycotoxins and heavy metals. That matters, and we do all of it rigorously. But that is not where the health benefits come from. If all we cared about was avoiding the bad stuff, this would be simple. What we actually care about is what we can add:  regenerating the soil and improving its quality, because that's what raises the beneficial compounds in the cup.

So on the soil, we farm regeneratively and biodynamically; we're pursuing Demeter certification, which is the strictest organic standard in the world. Practically, that means we don't strip the land, we build it: composting, cycling nutrients back into the soil, maintaining native tree cover, and keeping buffer zones of native vegetation along the streams to protect the water. We're also experimenting with biochar, essentially charcoal made from plant waste, which we work into the soil to sequester carbon and hold nutrients in place.

And here's the part nobody else can say: we have ten years of data showing that what we do at the farm level actually increases the antioxidants in your final cup. We are the only company that has measured that link and can prove it. A typical producer is optimizing for maximum yield this season. We're optimizing to make the soil, and the coffee that comes out of it, measurably better every single year. The farm is certified carbon-negative against a 2022 baseline, which tells you the direction we're moving.

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