This coffee species originated in Africa, in the humid forest of Central and West Africa including Uganda and Madagascar.
Like its arabica cousin, C. canephora can grow tall; if left to its own device, it can attain a majestic thirty feet in height.
But like the Arabica plant, it is kept to about eight feet in height to allow for harvesting.
Coffea canephora is a bigger tree than Arabica with broader and larger leaves which are pale green. Flower per clusters are more. Berries are small but higher in number per node ranging from 40 to 60.
Coffea canephora doesn’t deliver a crop until three to five years after it is planted, after which the fruits take almost a year to mature. And the plant can continue to bear cherries for twenty to thirty years.
Coffea canephora appreciates sixty inches of rain per year. However, this plant likes it considerably hotter than its arabica cousin, and also tolerates higher humidity.
Coffea canephora has two important varieties, namely:
*Robusta variety which has a stiff upright growth
*Nganda variety, grows mainly stems and forms a bog bush.
It is a lowland coffee with wider geographic distribution. It grows under relatively more open and humid conditions than Arabica.
Coffea Canephora is found in low and middle altitude areas in Africa including Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Uganda, Angola, Ghana, Togo, Madagascar, Tanzania and Republic of Central Africa, in the Far East including India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Oceania for example New Caledonia.
Coffea Canephora is resistant to disease and higher yielding than robusta plants. The typical robusta tree yields as much as two to three pounds of beans per year – about twice the amount produced by an arabica plant.
Moreover, at 2 percent caffeine by weight, the caffeine content of robusta coffee is higher than that of arabica.
Crop of Coffea Canephora
