Today, we had an early start to the day as we made our way to Doka Estate to tour our first coffee farm of the trip. There, we had our first look at the production and process of growing and exporting coffee. It all starts with two coffee seedlings that are grown together in a pot, which then grow into soldiers that look like a grey, dead flower. I found it interesting how the two seeds combine to grow into two separate trees, but are joined at the root. The trees reach their full yield at three years old and continue to produce at a high rate until they reach seven years old and have to be pruned (trimmed). In Costa Rica, because the main goal is to produce the best quality possible, only the red cherries are picked from the trees. Costa Rica only produces one percent of the world’s coffee, but it is the second most expensive. This is because there is less land than other top producers of coffee, so Costa Rican coffee farms focus on quality rather than quantity in order to compete in the market.

We then looked at the different technologies and machines that are used throughout the process of producing coffee beans. This is vastly different from the strawberry farm that we visited later in the day because much of the strawberry farm is worked by hand. There are machines used to weigh the beans, peel the skin off the coffee fruit, and in the drying process. On the strawberry farm, they had an irrigation system to water the strawberry plants under the canopy where they were grown. Rain would collect from the top of the canopies and flow down into areas where the water collected, to then be distributed to water the strawberry plants. I was impressed by the scale of the strawberry farm, it rolled over the hills farther than I could see. Here, I also tried my first strawberry and was pleasantly surprised.

I think there are some areas where they could implement technology on the farms, especially the coffee farm, but I can see the challenges in doing so. The guide told us that they have to hand-pick the beans because the terrain is harder to navigate with all the uneven ground, which makes it hard to implement machines to pick the beans. We also learned that the price of coffee has risen drastically in the past couple of years due to droughts in countries like Brazil, which has brought all prices up to Costa Rica’s price. We discussed ways for coffee producers to try and keep the demand of their consumers even though the price has continued to rise. One way was by making espresso machines that would make the same amount of coffee but with fewer beans. The effects of global warming have hit the coffee production community hard in the past few years and it’s up to the people to find ways to navigate the changing climate.