Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
The second most commonly traded commodity in the world - after oil - is coffee.
It's been grown and loved since at least the 13th century in places like Indonesia, Ethiopia and Central and South America.
But as drought and a fungus disease threaten the crop world-wide, scientists are mapping the coffee genome to learn more about this plant - and to see where else it might grow.
And California just might play a bigger role in its future.
Santa Barbara is a far cry from the tropics, where the world's most respected coffee is grown. But Good Land Organics farm owner Jay Ruskey is an experimental farmer, like a long line of Californians. Since the late 1800s, agricultural explorers have roamed the world and brought back crops that ultimately did succeed here — avocados came from Mexico and Guatemala, dates from Morocco and navel oranges from Brazil.
For the California Report, Lisa Morehouse has more.