BOOK / INVESTIGATIVE NONFICTION · IN DEVELOPMENT
The Second Harvest
The history of coffee’s leaf harvest and the market taking shape around it.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The rest of the tree.
Coffee built an empire on a single seed. The same tree has been growing leaves the whole time, and at coffee’s origins people have brewed them for generations. The Second Harvest tells how the leaf slipped out of the trade’s vocabulary, how a commodity system came to keep a one-column ledger of the tree, and what is changing now that a market for Specialty Coffee Leaf is taking shape.
The book moves from the highland forests where coffee began to a working farm in the mountains of Puerto Rico, and from research labs to a café counter in Portland, Maine. Along the way, a financier turned accidental farmer follows the question that runs through all of it: what would a coffee farm, and the forest around it, become if the whole tree earned its keep?
Forthcoming from Copper Mill Press, fall 2027.
Back to BooksTHE QUESTION
What is the rest of this tree worth?
For editors
I began writing and gathering material for The Second Harvest in 2023.
The Second Harvest · Investigative nonfiction manuscript in development
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