Today we visited Life Monteverde, whose main goal is to educate about sustainable farming. To start the day, we heard a lecture from Don Guillermo who is a Tico farmer involved with Life Monteverde. He described the past and present of the small family run company. A cooperative was formed in 1971 with other families to help each other and support the community, unfortunately, about 5 years ago the cooperative was dissolved.
There are challenges to being a Tico farmer. When Café de Monteverde was a smaller company, they could be involved in the chicken business profitably, but once they became a medium size, larger businesses tried and succeeded to knock them out of the competition. Another challenge is climate change. Typically, harvesting season is about 4 months long, but more recently it has been around 8 months long because the change in climate results in the plants growing at different times. This creates an atmosphere where much more work has to be done and workers have to be hired, and paid, for twice as long as normal. It makes farmers like Don Guillermo happy to spread education about farming and sustainability, as he did today for us.
The tour we attended today provided a lot more information from an engineering perspective than other tours. We were constantly asked “why” we thought they conducted their farming in a certain matter. Engineering and technology play a huge role in creating a sustainable farm. There can be so many unforeseen consequences when manipulating and utilizing the environment, and all of these effects must be counteracted by technology and scientific ideas to avoid creating an unsustainable situation. A lot of waste is created from the animals on the farm, but this is used to fertilize the fields. The animals create a metric ton of fertilizer every month, and this is more beneficial than synthetic fertilizer, as that creates the most emissions of anything else on the farm. Planting and growing takes a lot more than just sticking a seed in the ground, and the only way to create the most efficient and sustainable harvest is to employ the ideas of engineering and technology.