Coffee Plantation Tour

Today we took a tour of an organic, fair trade, coffee plantation.  It is 100% owned and operated by a Costa Rican cooperative group.  There are 137 farmers in the coop spread out over the northern part of the country near Sarapiqui.  It was fascinating to see the process of shade-growing the plants, picking the ripe berries, choosing "first quality" beans inside, shelling and drying them, then shipping them around the world.  It's quite a sustainable operation too... They use the dried second shells for fuel, along with scrap bark wood from local furniture-makers to dry the beans.  They compost the berry shells along with bad beans and other scraps in order to make organic fertilizers for their fields.  They have worms helping to compost this waste and many of the rapidly reproducing worms get fed to tilapia that they keep on site and sell at the local markets.  And finally, they have a series of man made ponds where the dirty rinse water they use for the beans slowly flows through allowing decomposition and a decrease of nitrates and phosphates before being released into the river.  


They had some fabulous lunch options to have with coffee after the tour and it seems like this kind of tourism is really good for the local economy.  The waterfall was nice too! :)