zmescience.com
Coffee Is Now Growing in Sicily After a Century of Failed Attempts, and Scientists Say Climate Change Is Making It All Possible
A century ago, growing coffee outdoors in Palermo was a losing battle against the cold. Today, a Sicilian family is harvesting coffee cherries from plants growing in the open air. On the outskirts of Palermo, Sicily, the Morettino family is growing Arabica coffee outdoors, harvesting about 100 kilograms of coffee cherries annually that produce just over 15 kilograms of roasted beans. It is a tiny harvest by global standards, but it carries a much bigger message. As the Mediterranean warms, crops once confined to tropical regions are beginning to find a foothold farther north. Yet Sicily’s coffee experiment comes with a catch. The same climate change making the plants possible could make the water they need harder to secure. Palermo once could not keep coffee alive The significance of the Sicilian harvest becomes clearer when viewed against Palermo’s past. In 1905, the city’s Botanical Garden tried growing 25 coffee plants outdoors, but the plants failed to survive winter temperatures that fell below −3°C. Another attempt in 1911 also failed when a wave of freezing weather destroyed the plants. More than a century later, coffee is growing outdoors in the same city. And the story of how it got there stretches...
