May tanong ako: what do you call a farm where the coffee grows under pine trees, next to avocado and pomelo, with ginger and sweet potato filling the gaps below? In most of the world that's an unusually complicated way to farm. In Benguet, it's just how coffee has been grown for generations, and it has a name — agroforestry — that makes it sound more like a science than a habit. It is both.
The core idea is layering. Instead of clearing a hillside and planting one crop in tidy rows, agroforestry stacks multiple species at different heights: tall shade trees at the top, coffee in the middle layer, and food crops or smaller shrubs underneath. In Benguet and Mountain Province, this typically means Arabica growing under Benguet pine canopy, with leguminous trees like Alnus (alder) planted specifically to enrich the soil, plus fruit trees — avocado, pomelo, lemon, mango, jackfruit, star apple — filling out the mid-canopy, and ginger, beans, and squash working the ground level. A single hillside becomes a small, functioning ecosystem that happens to also produce a cash crop.
Cordillera Green Network, a Baguio-based NGO founded in 2001, has basically built a methodology out of this. Starting in 2006 in the remote community of Sagpat, Benguet, they introduced a deliberate planting sequence: leguminous trees go in first to fix nitrogen and build up soil health, then taller shade trees, then the Arabica coffee itself, and finally the intercrops. It's slower than just planting coffee and hoping for the best, but the payoff shows up in soil quality and long-term resilience. CGN has since scaled this to roughly a million seedlings planted across the Cordillera, about 200,000 of which are Arabica coffee.
A 2025 field study from Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University looked at six coffee-based agroforestry plantations across La Union and documented 17 different tree species being used across intercropping and multi-cropping setups. In Bagulin, farmers paired coffee with star apple and mango. In Rosario, coconut was the companion crop. In Naguilian, farmers went even broader, mixing in avocado, guava, jackfruit, pomelo, and mango together. The study found the multi-cropping plots in San Gabriel had the highest soil organic carbon of the group — a pretty direct signal that more plant diversity aboveground translates to healthier soil below.
There's also a soil science angle that's easy to overlook. A study out of Atok, Benguet, published in the Journal of Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences, assessed Arabica agroforestry systems using either Alnus or fruit trees as shade, across different elevations and coffee tree ages. It rated the overall soil sustainability as "moderately sustainable" at 2.03 out of 3.0, but bulk density — basically a measure of soil compaction and health — scored "highly sustainable" at 2.90 out of 3.0. Interestingly, plots shaded by Alnus performed especially well on bulk density, likely because alder trees drop more litter and that litter decomposes faster, feeding the soil continuously.
The Itogon community in Benguet offers maybe the clearest human story behind all this data. There, Kankanaey Igorot families grow Arabica Typica trees that are semi-wild, scattered across elevations from 300 to 2,100 meters, intercropped with bananas, plantains, avocado, pomelo, and lemon. Some of these trees have been in the same families for more than 56 years — inherited, not planted from scratch — and the whole system runs organically, with no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, largely because that's simply how it's always been done, not because of a certification requirement.
Benguet State University's Institute of Highland Farming Systems and Agroforestry has taken this traditional knowledge and formalized it into research and extension work, running what they call the Benguet Pine Agroforestry System as a demonstration model. Their coffee farms earned international recognition as an Organic Producer back in 2007–2008 through a partnership with the Figaro Foundation — proof that this wasn't just an academic exercise but something buyers were willing to certify and pay for.
More recently, there's the AGSAMA KAPE project, running from 2024 to 2030, funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented by Socodevi in partnership with the Department of Agriculture. It's targeting climate-smart agroforestry across 1,000 hectares involving 2,800 indigenous women coffee producers spread across Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, Mountain Province, and Nueva Vizcaya. That's agroforestry being treated not as a nice tradition to preserve, but as active climate adaptation infrastructure — which, frankly, it is.
What makes all this worth paying attention to as a coffee drinker is that agroforestry isn't just an environmental checkbox. It's directly responsible for a lot of what makes Philippine specialty coffee taste distinctive — the slower ripening under shade, the mineral complexity from healthier soil, the resilience that keeps trees alive on steep, erosion-prone slopes through typhoon season after typhoon season. When a Benguet farmer plants coffee under a pine tree next to an avocado, they're not being quaint. They're running a system that's been quietly optimized over generations for exactly the conditions the Cordillera throws at it.
Efforts that fund and scale these layered, forest-integrated coffee systems — including work being done through Inclusive Forests — are one of the more concrete ways this kind of farming keeps expanding rather than disappearing.
🌱 Interested in how Philippine coffee connects to climate action and community development? Learn more about sustainable developers like Wovoka and community forestry initiatives like Inclusive Forests that are working at the intersection of great coffee and environmental impact.