Sustainability and the Environment: "Life is a Coffee Farm"

Ever since Saturday, the adventurers had been mulling over the things they'd learned on Livestock Day, intent on sorting it all out and making sense of the conflicting notions they'd attained. Just when they thought that they were never going to figure it all out, the cool instructors decided to give them one more perspective on sustainable farming, just in case they didn't have enough perspectives already. So on Tuesday, the 15th of April, the adventurers headed out to Doña Hermida's coffee farm on the outskirts of Monteverde to see what a sustainable coffee farm looked like.

It looked like this.

Hermida's farm is super interesting because she grows some of the most gourmet coffee in all of Monteverde; it's the stuff they sell in the fancy restaurants and hotels around here, probably the sort of coffee Jimmie from Pulp Fiction would buy. But that's not why her farm is interesting-- it's interesting because her farm is totally self-sustaining, super eco-friendly, and she sells her produce for a fraction of the price of the competition. Hermida can do this because she's basically changed the game instead of letting the game change her, by which I mean: she sells her coffee and other produce directly to the consumers, eliminating the need of an intermediary or third-party dispensary. She has shrunk the value chain, and by selling directly to her consumers, she has made her farm one of the most sustainable in all of Costa Rica. 

So naturally, this is the kind of place that the adventurers felt they had to go check out. Hermida, luckily, new they were coming, so she was nice enough to have some tasty lunch waiting for them. 

Here's Karen using lunch as a learning opportunity (it almost always is) 

Hermida's farm is a good place to go to to get another perspective on Livestock Day, so she had a bunch of chickens and roosters to show the students this day, but the pigs were suspiciously absent when the adventurers showed up. It's possible that it had something to do with the pork chops that Hermida served for lunch...

I know, but they were delicious...

While they were enjoying their delicious lunch, Karen talked with the students about the basics of being a coffee farmer here in Monteverde, and she passed around some coffee beans so they all knew what those looked like, which was super helpful.

Here's Amanda going, "Ohhhh, coffee BEANS...!" 

After lunch, Hermida took the adventurers out for an afternoon walk around her super awesome farm, which the adventurers were super excited about; they made sure to pay attention in case they ever decided that they wanted to start their own super-sustainable coffee farms someday. 

Eilish, Emma, and Amanda take a quick pause to feed the chickens 

Hermida's farm is pretty enormous, so it took the adventurers a long time to walk all around it. An interesting thing that they discovered on their exploration was that Hermida doesn't just grow coffee-- she has lots of different banana trees, some oranges, lots of yuca, and all sorts of crazy stuff. She also had a lot of other trees around her farm that she didn't harvest anything from, but which she kept as windbreaks, sort of like a natural fence that protects her crops from high winds. 

The adventurers pause to see what they can find to eat along their journey 

Morgan thinks these little baby tomatoes are simply delightful, oh my word 

Here's Karen saying, "Guys, these are the coffee plants, so don't step on them, okay?" 

Doña Hermida shows off some of her sweet machinery, while reminding the adventurers not to stick their hands in here

When they got all the way to the bottom of the hill, Doña Hermida took the adventurers into her nifty coffee bean drying room and showed them how she dries out the tasty coffee beans. Now the only problem with this was that the way she dried the coffee beans was by keeping it super duper hot inside this little greenhouse, so the adventurers walked in thinking they were all big and bad and then basically just evaporated into the sun. Lucky for them, they only had to go in there for like a second, so it wasn't that terrible. 

 Amanda looks like she's melting

  Here's a picture of Morgan looking at the coffee beans (it's hard to make stationary coffee beans seem exciting) 

Right outside the greenhouse, Rachel, Eilish, and Erica found a bunny rabbit, which sorta distracted them for a while 

You guys, it was a pretty great outing, and a fantastic companion to Livestock Day. Doña Hermida's farm was a model of sustainability, and the adventurers were happy to see the brighter side of things on this trip. Positivity and optimism are imperative when you're studying this sort of thing; it can be really easy to decide that everything's hopeless, but everything's not hopeless, not by a longshot. This day just reminded the adventurers of that. It was a day of good coffee, good companions-- a good day!

Angela is wondering if she can just sorta slip away and stay up here forever