Abstract

Coffea arabica beans can be produced when basically considering two system types, conventional and organic. The main difference lies in the fact that the conventional system sues chemical fertilizers and pesticides whereas, in the organic system the produce use inputs derived from organic matter. Naturally, the presence or absence of filamentous fungi occurs in both systems. In conventional farming, the fungi found are usually related to the production of mycotoxins whereas in organic coffees, there is still a lack of studies on the diversity of these fungi. With this motivation, this article proposes the use of a Zero-inflated Poisson model as an alternative to discriminate the organic and conventional growth systems in relation to the incidence of filamentous fungi in C. arabica beans using Bayesian inference techniques. The main advantage in favour of the use of this model is given in the update of the experimental results obtained in past experiments through the analysis of other collected coffee bean samples of the same species, allowing a more careful assessment of the production, coffee quality, and of the coffee products.

Key words: Coffea arabica, cultivation system, ZIP model, Bayesian inference.