Today we returned to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica to visit two plantations, a pineapple plantation and a banana plantation. After spending most of last week focusing on the supply chain of coffee, visiting these fruit plantation was a new and different experience. The tours we took offered a unique look into life as a fruit farmer in Costa Rica and we got to try some of the best fruit I have ever had.

The first stop we took was to visit the banana plantation. It was a smaller family farm and where we got to cut down our own plantains and prepare them to eat with our lunch. This farm was 100% organic as they were conscious about their waste, materials, and harvesting techniques to ensure a sustainable environment. One thing I found very interesting was the use of citronella plants in place of pesticides as well as the use of compost and manure as fertilizer. This plantation differed greatly from the coffee plantations we visited because of the climate, goals, and struggles they face. One of the main struggles of a banana farmer is mitigating disease and pests. We learned about banana plants are basically clones of one another as a new plant is made from taking the baby and replanting it away from the mother, this makes banana plantation highly susceptible to disease because one disease could wipe out an entire plantation due to the same genetic makeup of each plant. There are chemical ways to limit this threat however this family farm strays from chemics as they are organic farmers so they must be diligent in caring for their crops.

Similarly at the next plantation we learned about the diligent work that goes into pineapple farming. This tour was one of my favorites so far because of the interesting nature of pineapples. At a pineapple plantation like the one we visited workers must ensure that each of the many pineapple plants stays ‘happy’. This means monitoring its nutrients, making sure they are healthy, and providing plenty of water. There are many pineapple plants on the plantation (twenty-two thousand shoots per acre) so this is a labor intensive task. Not to mention that each plant is hand planted and hand picked by the workers of the farm. And to complicate matter further this plantation was 100% certified organic, meaning they can only naturally control threats like pests and weeds with plastic lining on the fields and microorganisms as a pesticide. The main threat we learned about on this plantation was the Tecla butterfly who lays their eggs on the pineapple and the hatched larvae cause impurities in the pineapple making it a product they are unable to export. The only way for the plantation to mitigate this is with those natural pesticides made from micro organisms. Similarly if the pineapple is handled wrong during harvest it will also be unable to export because it is a plant that is easily bruised, so workers must be very careful when harvesting and exporting the fruit.

Both of these plantation I think require a lot more labor intensive work than what we saw on the coffee plantations. They both also harvest year round while coffee only harvest once a year. Coffee however does have a much longer process to prep the bean for exportation as it must go through multiple processes before it is ready for roasting. The fruits for the most part are harvested and then prepared for shipment. Another main difference was the different climate required to grow these fruits as opposed to coffees climate. The Caribbean side is much more humid and rainy than the volcanic location of coffee plantations, It was so interesting to learn about this different lifestyle and work done on the fruit plantations in comparison to coffee. Personally if I had to pick one plantation I would want to work at, I would pick the pineapple plantation. The growing process for this fruit was so interesting to me as well of the added bonus of access to fresh pineapple. Although the climate for pineapple growing might be hard to begin with I think I would be able to adjust.