What are F1 Hybrid Varieties Today? Are F1 Coffee Varieties More Adaptable to the Environment?

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style).

Environmental Challenges to Global Coffee Production

Changing weather patterns, pests and diseases, deforestation, and rising temperatures are just some of the environmental factors threatening global coffee production. It's estimated that by 2050, we could lose up to 40% of arable land suitable for coffee cultivation, posing unprecedented challenges to today's coffee industry.

Developing Hybrid Coffee Varieties

One possible solution to address these issues is switching to new hybrid varieties that offer resilience without compromising quality. In the early 1990s, CIRAD began selecting F1 Arabica hybrids with different partners such as CATIE, PROMECAFE, and ECOM. This work led to the selection and dissemination of various high-performance hybrids whose names have become widely recognized, such as H1-Centroamericano, H3, Starmaya, and Cassiopeia. Since 2017, CIRAD has been coordinating the BREEDCAFS (Breeding Coffee for Agroforestry Systems) Horizon 2020 project, funded by the European Union.

BREEDCAFS Objectives

The goal of BREEDCAFS is to develop new breeding strategies to create coffee varieties that can both cope with environmental stresses related to climate change and are better suited for agroforestry conditions. Agroforestry systems offer benefits to growers, but many traditional coffee varieties are not suitable for shade cultivation.

To understand how these varieties might benefit coffee production, I spoke with BREEDCAFS researchers in France, Denmark, Vietnam, Cameroon, and Nicaragua about the advantages and challenges these varieties offer and their potential role in the future coffee industry.

Why Do Hybrid Coffee Varieties Exist?

According to Benoît Bertrand, a breeding specialist at CIRAD, the greater the genetic distance between two coffee parents, the more vigorous their offspring will be. This is what scientists call "heterosis" or "hybrid vigor." F1 hybrids are the first-generation offspring resulting from crossing two genetically distinct parent plants. These hybrids combine characteristics from both parents, including better cup quality and disease resistance, better adaptation to climate change, and higher yields—making them well-suited to today's changing environmental conditions.

The French research center CIRAD helps countries address agricultural challenges and launched BREEDCAFS in 2017 to create various coffee varieties for sustainable production. These varieties can address declining yields and quality. According to Hervé Etienne, a senior researcher at CIRAD and project coordinator, when Arabica coffee plants suffer, their quality is also affected.

Hybrid Varieties Improve Productivity and Resilience

Coffee plants thrive when grown in shade, but full sun cultivation is often preferred because it yields 40% more than shade-grown coffee plants. However, F1 hybrids can grow in both agroforestry and full-sun conditions while maintaining high yields. Hervé notes that in his experience, F1 hybrids produce an average of 40% higher yields than conventional varieties grown in both sun and agroforestry conditions. The BREEDCAFS project aims to leverage this advantage of adapting to agroforestry conditions by selecting new shade-adapted hybrids.

Compared to traditional varieties, hybrids typically bear fruit after only three years, thus producing high yields starting from the second year of cultivation, which can also improve productivity. This allows producers to increase their production capacity and productivity in shorter timeframes. Additionally, research shows that F1 hybrids are less susceptible to stressful environments and coffee leaf rust.

Hybrids Produce High-Quality Cup Profiles

Unfavorable growing conditions mean that many traditional Arabica coffee varieties with excellent cup quality cannot fully realize their potential. However, the development of hybrids may offer a solution to this problem, which is why CIRAD researchers are developing hybrids with genes that make them highly resilient, helping them produce better cup quality and adapt to harsh environments.

The quality potential of these F1 varieties has been recognized with awards in past Cup of Excellence competitions. WCR (World Coffee Research) agrees, noting that F1 varieties have very good or distinctive cup quality—praise typically reserved for exotic varieties like Geisha.

Current Performance of F1 Varieties

Although research is crucial to understanding how F1 varieties function, they also need to be monitored under practical conditions. BREEDCAFS partners are testing hybrids in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cameroon, and Vietnam, working with national and local organizations to ensure the project's sustainability.

Pierre Marraccini, a researcher and molecular physiologist at CIRAD, says it's important to test how hybrids perform under different conditions and are affected by different soil types, weather conditions, and human influences.

This will test how F1 varieties adapt to different environments, which may affect how widely F1 varieties are accepted by farmers worldwide. "Through our field investigations in farm demonstration plots, we are comparing farmers' responses to new hybrid varieties versus traditional ones," Pierre explains.

Despite these efforts showing that F1 hybrids could replace traditional varieties, in Central America, where they have been available for 20 years, less than 5% of farms have adopted them. There are adoption barriers involving accessibility as well as acceptance by the agricultural community and coffee industry.

Overcoming Accessibility Barriers

Although much work involving hybrid multiplication is done in laboratories, establishing laboratories in each coffee-producing country can be challenging and costly, making them inaccessible to many producers.

Therefore, Hervé's team learned how to propagate hybrids without laboratories, adapting their practices according to local technologies and infrastructure to develop an affordable and easily replicable mini-cutting nursery method. CIRAD works with research institutions in each country to ensure they each achieve full autonomy in hybrid propagation, whether through laboratory methods (such as somatic embryogenesis) or horticultural methods (such as mini-cuttings). The goal is to increase the propagation potential of hybrids by increasing accessibility, reducing costs, and limiting transportation issues.

Many cooperatives, companies, and associations managed by women are involved because female producers and workers often lack access to technological advances. Melanie Bordeaux, Scientific Director at the Fundación Nicafrance in Nicaragua, says any innovation that makes F1 hybrids accessible to smallholder producers and women in coffee-growing communities is important because "technological innovation in coffee varieties has become the exclusive benefit of medium and large producers, mainly due to production costs and propagation techniques controlled by specialized companies with high operating costs. This reality makes plant prices more expensive, which in turn limits access for small producers."

She adds that democratizing hybrid propagation techniques helps smallholder female producers and/or wives of smallholder producers reduce their production costs, making it easier for them to renovate their farms and promote agroforestry.

Growing Social Acceptance

To ensure hybrids are adopted by producers, it's important to understand their lives and farming methods. Aske Skovmand Bosselmann, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen and leader of the BREEDCAFS farmer survey project, says it's important to complement their scientific findings from controlled experiments with the experiences and perspectives of farmers using new coffee hybrids.

Surveying farmers provides key information about their farm sizes, diversification status, farming techniques (including availability of shade trees), access to resources (financing, inputs, training, etc.), and surrounding ecosystems.

Gwendoline Naah, a socio-economist at IRAD (Institute of Agricultural Development for Research) in Cameroon, who manages the farmer surveys, says this helps "identify constraints faced by producers" and "understand farmers."

Reports created by BREEDCAFS from these surveys can guide producer decision-making. For example, they can show producers that by planting shade trees, they can earn additional income by harvesting fruit or timber while also helping to protect their coffee plants.

Increasing Supply Chain Demand

Understanding what prevents each supply chain member from buying and selling hybrids can help researchers identify sources of misinformation so they can address problems at their source and encourage hybrid adoption.

This is important because simply educating producers about hybrids or helping them use them is not enough. Unless there's a market for these coffees, producers won't be able to sell them and will eventually lose interest in growing coffee. That's why involving traders and roasters in hybrid research is also very important.

To increase the adoption of F1 varieties in the market, each member of the coffee supply chain needs to understand their nature and what they offer. BREEDCAFS created dialogue platforms in each country to encourage supply chain members to share their perspectives on F1 varieties. They found that most people didn't see the need and potential of F1 varieties. "These dialogue platforms represent privileged moments of exchange between supply chain participants," says Hervé.

For more specialty coffee beans, please add FrontStreet Coffee on private WeChat, ID: kaixinguoguo0925

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473