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| Coffe fields at Life Monteverde |
We spent this morning at Life Monteverde, a sustainable coffee farm. Felix, our guide took us for a tour of the coffee farm and we saw coffee plants in different stages. He explained that to pick a bushel of coffee in their cooperative of twelve farms, a workers earns a minimum of $235 as opposed to the national minimum wage for coffee picking, $1.50. This ensures that the coffee pickers take pride in the work and pick only the best beans. Most of the coffee pickers are migrant workers because Costa Ricans don't typically look for manual labor jobs. 95% of people in Monteverde are employed in some way by tourism, so locals picking coffee is rare. After our coffee talk, we went into one of the small forests in the fields to discuss the importance of forests in agriculture. Forests attract pollinators like birds birds and bats, provide shade breaks for workers, regulate the temperature, prevent erosion, act as wind breaks, provide nutrients to the soil, give wild animals something else to eat besides the crops, and keep the environment natural.
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| Coffee plants |
After learning all that, we took a tour of the farm with all kinds of vegetables, corn, bananas, rosemary (as a natural insect repellant), zucchini, and much more. They had tilapia ponds, pigs for methane, goats, and chickens. We even got to hold a baby goat to "become connected with agriculture." We discussed the importance of integrating agriculture, sustainability, and the outdoors into our future classrooms and planted little baby trees in one of the coffee fields.
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| The baby goat |
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| Planting my tree |
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| Our group hanging out at Life Monteverde |
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