Agritour Features the Best of Costa Rica

By Jane Eckert

This past January, I led a farm tour to Costa Rica, and I want to share with you some of our observations and things that we learned as we toured.  We were fortunate to have a wonderful tour guide and several face to face contacts with the producers as we toured their farms.  We not only were able to ask questions, we had enough time to get to know them and hear their passion for agriculture and what they do. Let me share with you some of our tour highlights.

For those not familiar with Costa Rica, it is a small country located in Central America with a total population of just 4.5 million—about the land mass of West Virginia. The country abounds with eco-diversity.  It is very clean, the people are exceedingly friendly, and most of the farmland is quite mountainous. Obviously, for those of us coming from the Midwest, it was rather difficult to imagine farming on such difficult terrain.

An Agritour to Costa Rica of course necessitates a visit to a coffee plantation, and our night time tour stop at Hacienda Real Coffee gave us insight into the coffee business. Jorge Cutié, the owner, explained that they are one of the few coffees in the world that is grown, picked, processed, roasted and packaged all at the point of origin. The outdoor flashlight tour started with the coffee plants and then came indoors for the rest of the coffee bean processing.

Hacienda Real was proud to tell us that they recently obtained the Utz Coffee Certification.  This certification ensures both socially responsible and good agricultural practices of recognized coffee farms around the world. The tour ended with a very ceremonious approach to coffee tasting that many of our participants chose to mimic before heading to the retail gift shop.

The gift shop had plenty of coffee flavors for sale, coffee liqueurs and value-added products produced by Hacienda Real, and we were all quite willing to make our purchases. While most of us never think of offering a nighttime farm tour, we were told by Jorge that actually it had been at the request of a local tour operator.  The tour operator recognized that they are in an area with many adventure tours for the day, but nothing for tour groups to do at night. I know this idea got at least one in our group to start thinking about developing a nighttime tour for the motor coach traffic so near to their property.

Our evening ended with a delicious local meal at a featured lodge in the area. However, Jorgé shared with me at the conclusion that he is going to develop his own local dinner option in order to keep more revenue for Hacienda Real.  Be sure to check when you plan your visit to Costa Rica.

The Villa Vanilla tour stop was just as much about listening to Henry Karczynski, the owner of Rain Forest Spices—a certified organic farm, as it was touring the beautiful vanilla plantation. Henry was raised in Chicago and began in agriculture when he joined the Peace Corp in 1975. His work began in Costa Rica and the Caribbean, and he has resided in the area since 1977.

After starting with traditional practices to grow vanilla commercially, he was faced with several years of tropical hurricanes and excessive rain that forced him to reconsider his growing practices.  It was at that time that Henry became a convert to learning more about sustainable and holistic methods called biodynamics. He first learned about the methods in the book “Secrets of the Soil” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.

The farm is now planted with a variety of spice and essential-oil cash crops.  With the flora diversity that he has now introduced on his farm, he established a tropical humid forest, which has also brought about the return of birds, monkeys and other animals.

The Spice Plantation Walking Tour allowed us to learn about the origin of many spices, the medicinal uses and, of course, smelling and sampling the products they grow. Our sampling was held inside an open air building on stilts with a spectacular view of the rain forest. The tour ended in the retail gift shop, with our mouths watering for more.

While we were not quite sure what to expect at the strawberry farm, Finca Integral Didactica, the Alberto Salazar family greatly exceeded all of our expectations. The Salazar family had never before hosted a tour group, but felt they were greatly honored to have North American farmers wanting to visit. In fact, the month prior to our arrival, they built a new building complete with restroom specifically to provide us with a place for our opening and closing remarks about the farm.

The entire thirteen-member Salazar family was present and none of them spoke English.  Therefore, an interpreter assisted the family spokesperson.  Before we began, they served each of us a fresh strawberry smoothie at tables draped with the colors of the Costa Rican flag. The entire farm is 32-acres, and besides strawberries they grow broccoli, potatoes, carrots, sweet pepper and cabbages, all of which are sold at four, weekly local farmers markets.

The day neutral strawberry production was most unique in that they are grown on raised beds about 14” tall, and the entire acreage is covered in two open air greenhouses.  This allows them to avoid the excessive rains during their rainy season and control the moisture through black tape and drip irrigation.

The tour ended back in their new building with strawberry shortcake and many boxes of strawberries for us to enjoy on the bus. We were all so very impressed by their gracious hospitality and the fact that the entire family made the effort to be with us.  As we left this stop we were all confident that while we had been their first agritourism group, many will now follow.

The Agritour included many other stops too numerous to mention in this article, but we all shared at the end of each day just how much we enjoyed and learned about agriculture in Costa Rica. If you would like to join the 2011 Agritour to Israel, please watch this publication for future information or check out my website, www.eckertagrimarketing.com

Jane Eckert, a national speaker, author and agritourism expert, is principal of Eckert Agrimarketing (www.eckertagrimarketing.com), a firm that helps farmers sell products directly to consumers and develop their operations into tourist destinations, and CEO of Rural Bounty.com, a consumer based directory of agritourism farms in North America.  Jane can be reached by phone 314-862-6288 or at jane@eckertagrimarketing.com