Palermo, first coffee grown and harvested in Italy: warmer climate is changing farming

Rising temperatures now allow coffee to be grown in Italy. In Sicily, the Morettino family has completed its first harvest, showing how climate change is reshaping crops worldwide.

A plantation on the outskirts of Palermo has for the first time produced Arabica coffee beans grown and harvested entirely in Italy. The result, achieved on the Morettino family estate, has been made possible by climate change, which has effectively brought tropical temperatures to southern Italy.

While global warming had already enabled southern England to produce champagne-style sparkling wine , pushing the traditional growing areas of France and northern Italy further north, the jump made by coffee from equatorial zones to the Mediterranean is clearly even greater.

As the daily newspaper La Stampa reported on Thursday (source in Italian) , the Sicilian plantation in the San Lorenzo ai Colli area, a few hundred metres above sea level, is currently producing around 100 kilograms of drupes (the fruit of the coffee plant, also known as cherries) , which yield just over 15 kilograms of roasted beans.

The project, which involves the University and the Botanical Garden of Palermo (source in Italian) in studying how tropical crops adapt to the new Mediterranean climate, is still far from large-scale commercial production in terms of volume, but it already has considerable scientific and symbolic value.

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