Today’s coffee tour was very different that both Doka and Café Britt. Life Monteverde, a small coffee company in the mountains of Monteverde, is unique in the approach it takes to creating a sustainable coffee-growing process. Every part of the process from the parchment of the coffee fruit to the manure produced by the chickens is used to supplement another part of the process.

After seeing this plantation, I have realized how difficult the life of a Tico farmer truly is. In Monteverde especially, the terrain is very unforgiving, but all the beans still need to be harvested during the picking season. There is no getting around the endless sweeps of the property. Additionally, the weather in Costa Rica makes long days in the field very tiring. Despite there being great cloud cover on the green mountain, the sun still beats down for several hours and the humidity left me sweating after only a few hours of hiking.

The aforementioned problems were already made clear after just the Doka and Britt visits, but after learning about the sustainability efforts at Life Monteverde, I was exposed to so many more challenges that the farmers and engineers must tackle together, and I learned a lot through learning about the innovative solutions that are already in place. First, the wind in the mountains presents a challenge for farmers because it can be detrimental to the growth of a large coffee plant. To counteract this, small sections of land are filled with a grid of tress to serve as a windbreaker, but these sections of forest are taken advantage of in many other ways. For example, diseases like leaf rust and roosters eye always pose a threat to coffee plants, so the sections of trees split up the coffee in order to prevent the spread of disease to all of the plants. Additionally, the forest serves as a place for wildlife to thrive. Birds area able to nest and reproduce in the forests and they serve as extra pollinators for the coffee plants. One more use for the forests is to give space to give tours. As discussed earlier this week, tourism is now a key revenue source for many coffee plantations, and these tours are a great place for guides to teach visitors about the native wildlife. One final benefit of the forests is the creation of shade. Shade lowers the humidity which allows coffee plants to grow much better, so tall, leafy trees are chosen to be planted.

Another important aspect of the sustainable coffee planation is the fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers are often used by growers, but they give off harmful nitrogen gas during production. To combat this, Life Monteverde has chosen to replace as much synthetic fertilizer as possible with natural fertilizers. These fertilizers are composed of various manures, parts of the pulp of the coffee fruit, microorganisms, and several other natural materials. This fertilizer is composed of the same necessary element as synthetics- like nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, but it takes much more fertilizer per plant which is why the farm is not 100 percent natural fertilizer, or even close for that matter.

Visiting Café de Monteverde has shown me how many applications there are for engineering at a coffee plantation. As I learned in my first-year engineering curriculum, creating solutions that are effective and sustainable are the way of the future, and Café de Monteverde exemplifies that perfectly.