Don Guillermo is a Costa Rican coffee farmer that was born on Montiverde. Since he is so connected to the community, after living here his whole life, Don is very well-equipped to make the farm as sustainable and interconnected as possible. Life on the farm is different from life in the states. The houses are small because they try to use very little lumber to preserve the trees. The activities they do for fun or different because they do not have as much access to modern entertainment. Today people on the farms have laptops and a lot of the workers are in their 20s. I appreciate their way of Collecting data about their crops. They use qualitative measures to decide if they need to use more fertilizer, prune plants, or irrigate. 

Challenges on the farm are usually related to their location. There is more humidity on the mountain side which can cause certain kinds of damage to the leaves that is caused by fungus. In addition the wind is a problem that they have solved by adding trees that they call when bricks. Biodiversity is an issue because planting one crop tends to take away from biodiversity. To remedy this, they allow weeds to grow and weed-wack them so they are a smaller height but the root system is intact. They also have 40 percent of their form as forested to land. It is a secondary forest but it is still very productive and contains a lot of biodiversity including different animals like pumas and sloths.

Engineering is involved in every aspect of the farm. The solutions for many of the problems listed, such as wind, humidity, too much sunlight, and exposure to diseases because of proximity to the plants, are remedied via engineering techniques. To take care of the animals the goat feed is prepared using an innovation by one of the employees that involves a bike chain and a old coffee grinder. All of the creative solutions around the farm are engineering feats and the farm wouldn’t be successful without these applications. 

One specific suitable practice that I appreciated was the use of the methane produced from the compost. The compost is made by using maneuver and plant west and the compost is used as a fertilizer. The compost is it like decomposes is under a plastic sheet. This plastic sheet fills up with gas because decomposition produces methane and CO2. The gas is paved from the plastic to the kitchen and is then burned In the kitchen to produce food. According to the farmer this is enough gas to allow workers to cook with it for two hours every day. This is a very sustainable way to use every part of the material. They are cooking their food with animal manure and plants but they’re also fertilizing the other plants with the same material. This form is very sustainable and mix sure to take for vantage of every piece of the material they produce.