This morning we had another early start. After an amazing breakfast of fresh fruits and pancakes made by my mama tica, we drove two hours to Sarapiquí. Our first stop was a banana plantation. Even in the pouring rain, it was a really cool experience to see how a different supply chain runs their business and how they implement various sustainability practices. Similar to the coffee and chocolate companies, banana plantations reuse materials. Specific examples of this include using old banana plants for compost, and planting other crops such as mandarins and cassava to take advantage of every inch of space that they have. As a result, they’ll save money and time on grocery trips. The banana plantation hires local workers to do the work, thus providing jobs for the community. The biggest challenge that banana plantations face is climate change, which in turn affects the irrigation plans for the bananas. As the dry month time frame continues to increase, banana plantations have to figure out how to continue to make up for the lack of rain in the dry seasons. Additionally, growing organic bananas is especially significant because it will have a better impact on the environment, but that involves using zero chemicals. This process is both costly and time consuming. Therefore, big companies like Chiquita do use chemicals because they need to maintain large quantities of bananas so that they do not get infected by fungus or bacteria and can be exported to other countries in substantial quantities.

After eating lunch at the banana plantation, where we ate fresh plantain patacones using plaintains we harvested today, we drove over to a pineapple plantation. Costa Rica is the #1 producer of pineapple in the world, and produces 95% of organic pineapples. Here, they use natural and raw materials for their fertilizer, similar to the fertilizer we learned about at Life Monteverde, and the pineapple absorbs the fertilizer through their leaves. Employees are paid about $20-$22 minimum per day, and a lot of their employees come from Nicaragua. This is because Costa Rica has the third highest minimum wage in the Americas, behind Canada and the US, while Nicaragua has one of the lowest. I would say that a challenge for pineapple plantations is finding a more sustainable way to cover their plants. Currently they use plastic, which is the most effective material because it helps the plants to avoid erosion, reduces the temperature of the soil, and prevents weeds from growing around plants. However, keeping Costa Rica’s sustainability practices in mind, it just makes me wonder if there is some better material out there that could do a similar if not better job, and is better for the environment. Pineapple plantations’ biggest threat is pests and other insects that can infect the fruit. Local plantations like the one we visited today use organic ingredients to try and prevent this from happening instead of chemical pesticides. We also learned that the workers must grab the pineapple by the crown, the top, instead of around the bottom part, to prevent any bruising of the fruit.

We got to try some of the fresh pineapple while on the tour, and it is the best pineapple I have ever tasted. A lot of the pineapple I eat in the US is either sweet or kind of sour, but the pineapple I ate today was the sweetest one I have had. Our tour guide today explained to us how to pick a good pineapple: look at the size, the shape, and the size of the “eyes” on the pineapple from bottom to top, since the fruit ripens starting from the bottom. Hopefully, I can use this information when looking for pineapple at home, even though I know that it won’t be as good as the one I had today. I also enjoyed the piña colada that was provided at the end the tour as well. If I was a plantation worker, I would prefer to work at a pineapple plantation, because they pay a decent amount and the job would be year-round. It would be nice to have easy access to fresh pineapple as well. Working at a banana plantation would be much more manual labor, having to use machetes to cut down the banana plants, and working at a coffee plantation would be more tedious work, having to pick each individual coffee cherry.