FEATURE Nespresso
WHAT IS MUSHROOM COFFEE ?
Coffee-powered Farming with Nespresso We have a farm in The Fields. If you’ve ever wondered what happens in The Fields for the 361 days of the year that Wonderfruit isn’t being hosted, most of the answers lie there. It’s where we turn the leftovers of the festival into compost, where we grow fresh ingredients for the group of workers who call The Fields home, and—thanks to Nespresso—where we experiment with new ways to use coffee waste products, productively. Nespresso has an entire ecosystem around the world dedicated to collecting capsules that their customers have already enjoyed, tearing them down to their component parts (aluminium and coffee grounds), and returning these to the coffee growing and preparing processes. Each capsule is emptied of spent grounds, which are then heat treated and dried to ensure sterilization, and the aluminium is washed, crushed, shredded, and recycled into new capsules. Recycled capsules are a part of Nespresso’s commitment to 100% carbon neutral capsules by 2022. The nutrient-dense spent grounds are the part of the circular equation that we are most excited by. We get a steady supply of the brown gold, to experiment with on our farm. 42 / remthailand.asia
Our Nespresso coffee experiments have produced some pretty amazing results, and we think they could be even shared as examples of sustainable, future farming practices. Here are three ways we’re repurposing Nespresso coffee grounds at the farm: Mushroom Beds Mushrooms are magical. Even the normal, edible types. They grow fast, they grow in the dark, they break down organic material in the ground, and they are the ultimate sign of healthy soil. In our mushroom shack in The Fields, the mushrooms grow in bags of coffee-laced soil. If you’ve ever seen a pile of coffee grounds covered in mold, you’ll know why this is a great source of nutrients for mushrooms. They love coffee almost as much as we do. This is beneficial because mushrooms need rich soil. The type of soil that requires a lot of fertilizer, moisture, and additives to sustain their growth. By swapping to a coffee groundsinfused mix, we can grow the same volume of mushrooms without dipping into our high-value, nutrient-dense compost stores.