The Montero Coffee Farm

As we say goodbye to the Montero farm it is not because we feel we have had
enough of it. We wish we could stay for months, but will have to return
at another time. Here I have gained a new appreciation for a product used so often
 at home it's value is overlooked. Now that I've been introduced more closely
 to the worlds second largest industry, and formed strong connections
with people in it, I walk away with a vision of coming back andesite a confidence
that a fulfilling career could be made of it. This kind of experience is what
 proves travel to be an important part of our life. With@joymarieallen

In the last few months I have had either too little to talk about or too much to fit in words. And so my blog has been terribly neglected. But now I must share a recent experience I found in Costa Rica that is significant enough to change my life forever.

Before Christmas, while I was still studying Spanish in Dominical, Costa Rica, I became friends with another student from Germany named Max. One weekend, while dealing with the frustrations of the humid climate of the southern coastline, I jumped at an invitation from Max to go up to the mountains and stay a few days with a coffee farmer whom he knew, somehow. In between the small mountain towns of San Marcos and Santamaria, about an hour and a half below the central valley of San Jose, we stayed at the house of Carlos Montero, a coffee farmer in the region of Tarrazu, which I would learn was a reputable coffee growing region known throughout the world. Carlos had built a new house five years earlier and left us to stay in the old house next door along the gently flowing creek, complete with no windows, the remnants of a kitchen that had been ransacked for the new house, and an old rickety balcony that barely supported two people at the same time. This old house, whose only function was to store hundreds of sacks of dried coffee, also became our home, our oasis from the heat of the playas.

Each morning we woke up to breakfast and a fresh cup of coffee which we enjoyed over long conversations about the beverage we held in our hand, the history of Carlos' family, about his adventures traveling the world in his 20s, and about how he came to work in the coffee growing region of Tarrazu. The first day we walked through many mountainous roads which all lead eventually to the Cooperativa de Tarrazu, the second largest coffee producer in all of Costa Rica. Old Toyota trucks, Land Rovers from another time, wound their way through these roads bringing truck loads of dark red coffee berries to the mill. We toured the coffee plant over and saw how coffee is processed on a macro scale. Here 40 million pounds of coffee is processed every four month harvest. We got lucky in the end and cupped coffee with the CEO of the Coop. In San Marcos there is also a church, a central park, and a soccer field - the centerpieces to any Centralamerican town - but here, the center of town and the most frequented is the mill, the securer of livelihood to all coffee farmers and their families in all the land, for the most part.

During these daily talks with Carlos I learned more about coffee than all the five years combined that I had worked as a barista back home. I learned not only what factors on the farm contribute to a good cup of coffee, but also the socio-economic effects of coffee-drinking cultures on those who produce it. I had already known through experience the difficulties sustaining a livelihood based off the income of a coffeehouse alone. Nowadays, the cafe must be linked together with another aspect of coffee culture to be at all successful, be that a music venue, bookstore, or restaurant. Coffee is not enough. But now I see that it isn't enough for the farmers either. The difference is that unlike mo
st coffeehouse owners, coffee is all the farmers have. For this reason coffee famers like Carlos and his brother Manuel, who I would later meet, are forced either to abandon their farms for a different, more secure livelihood altogether or take a huge gamble sticking with them. On their playing cards are written the future of their children.

While the cooperative guarantees a buyer and a price to the farmers and their coffee, it is not a very good one. A big cooperative means big buyers, and big corporate companies like Starbucks and Seattle's Best bargain for their coffee at the cheapest prices possible. One time Manuel told me he was working in New Jersey and saw a pound of "Fair Trade" Tarrazu coffee in Starbucks selling for $14.40. He knew that only the 40 cents on the end is reserved for the farmer.

After leaving the farm that first weekend I knew I had to come back and learn more. While it was a great experience, it hurt to leave with the knowledge of an unfair system and without the prospect of development.

Months went by and I decided to come back to the Montero farm with my sisters and friends who had come to Costa Rica to visit me, and on this second trip we were shown the solution to the problems I had discovered before. This is when we met Manuel, Carlos' brother and business partner. Carlos and Manuel had invested in new land where they were building a micro mill so they could eventually process all of their own coffee and become independent from the cooperativas. They were excited to process their very first truck load of coffee the day after we arrived. Instead of dropping off truck-loads of coffee at the coop and returning to their farms, now the Montero brothers had to multiply their work load by four, and subject themselves to the entire coffee process. Our group was given the opportunity to become apart of this process and ease some of the initial work load.

A day in the life of an indigenous Panamanian coffee picker in Costa Rica. You spend twelve hours traversing steep mountain slopes with an increasingly heavy basket tied at your waist. The only escape from the blistering sun above your head is a meditation whose sole focus is the deep dark red. This color becomes your only purpose, and if your basket contains nothing to contradict it, then you may end up with three dollars when the day is done. You do this seven days a week for the entire four month harvest and then you go home to your family with barely enough to make it through the rest of the year.

Carlos took us on some mountain trails and we hand-picked the coffee berries off some organic trees that had naturally grown wild under the canopy of a small forest. There were six of us total, and after two hours we had picked almost one sack of coffee berries. Next we saw the dark red coffee of our days work thrown into a de-pulping machine and come out only enough to fill half the bag with slimy green beans. Then we returned to the mill to see other loads of coffee laid out on cement platforms and under green house shelves to dry naturally in the sun. Usually, we were told, the process takes about ten days, but it's entirely dependent on the rain and clouds that frequent these mountain valleys. During these ten days, a person must turn the coffee with a rake every 30 minutes in order for it to dry evenly. Also the black peaberries, a coffee bean so small that it avoids the de-pulping process, must be handpicked out of the heaps of drying coffee beans. This work alone occupied three days of our time and it wasn't easy. Hours of tedious work under the stretched-out plastic green house, trapping the heat of the sun around you, is exhausting. Carefully staring down at the little white beans and searching for thousands of smaller black ones is enough to make you go crazy. It took me until the second day to discover that bringing a small stereo and playing some tunes helps with the monotony of this process.

The Montero Coffee Farm

Meanwhile, Carlos and Manuel are de-pulping truck-load after truck-load of coffee berries. There are two indigenous Panamanian workers, one who is shoveling endless heaps of empty coffee berries into the back of the truck and the other who is dumping out baskets of slimy coffee beans out to dry. The heat of the green house dries out your eyes and turns your water warm, depraving it of any refreshing qualities. Pretty soon you feel like your shriveling up to resemble the raisin-like peaberries. Once the coffee is dried the process isn't over. The coffee still retains a light-colored shell over outside that must be removed. Small handfuls are taken from up and down the isles of drying coffee, placed into large hallowed tree stump, and ground using a large sculpted piece of wood. This is an ancient way of doing it, but because the Monteros don't have the money to afford the expensive machinery that would do it for them in minutes, they stick to the way of their father and his father before him. Once the coffee is lightly batted, it is put into a shallow bowl and tossed up and down while blowing on it, until the white shells fly away and only the green coffee beans remain. Its placed into a green coffee humidity tester. If the machine reads somewhere between 8 and 12 percent, the coffee is ready to be bagged.

As a barista one of my favorite coffees was always the Brazilian pea berry. 
Now I hate it with a passion after being given the task of hand picking 
every single pea berry in endless rows of coffee under the canopy of a green house. 
But I guess that don't change the fact that it makes one crazy good cup of coffee!

For me, all of this was gruely hard work, but for coffee farmers this is apart of their everyday life. What challenges they face are not of the hands and back. Once the production is moved from the cooperativas to the micro-mill, the farmers are in charge of finding their own buyers for their coffee. This is the challenge for all micro producers everywhere in the world. Given the scarcity of internet and the lack of education among famers in third world countries, how are they expected to connect with the right people? Also there is the unfortunate reality that they do not set the price of their own crop. That job is reserved for the professional coffee cuppers that spend their lives traveling to the coffee communities of the world, and with the quick taste of the tongue, determine the livelihood of coffee growers everywhere by setting a price based on their coffee. Luckily for Carlos and Manuel, their specialty coffee is much better than can be found at the cooperativas, but it requires so much more time and work. Any buyers who deals with Carlos and Manuel must be willing to pay the fair price that is due to coffees of such fine grade. Businessmen like this are getting harder to find.

Carlos and Manuel feel that three dollars to the pound is a fair price for their coffee, and though this is only a small fraction of what we pay for bulk coffee in the States, this price is practically unheard of in the farmers hands. Bad habits die hard, and the reality is that coffee has always had a dark history of exploitation and unfair prices. The root of this can be found uncomfortably close to the consumer. I think that because our coffee habits take the form of frequents breaks amid our busy days, we reason, it should cost us very little to maintain such a harmless addiction. The Monteros know that if they are to get fair prices for their coffee, they are going to have to sell directly to specialty coffee roasters, bypassing any kind of intermediary who would want a large cut for himself. They believe that the future of specialty coffee is dependent on the spanish phrase transparacion del café. When I asked them the significance of this term they went on for hours explaining some details of their life, and I listened and followed their tangents until it was nothing shorter than a life story. And this is what transparacion del café means. It means for coffee to have a transparency that it has never had before. It means for a relationship to be recognized on both sides of the cup. When this is accomplished our mindless purchases every day which feed our coffee addictions will become something meaningful. How much more satisfying would a cup of coffee be knowing that at the bottom of the cup there is a mutual satisfaction for both ourselves and the farmers.

Four days I've been introduced to the life of coffee farmers like Manuel Montero. And I've been hit hard by the social injustice caused by those who set prices around tables in high rise buildings on Wall Street. It hurts to see the effects of unfair prices in coffee producing communities first hand. Today I sit down with Manuel to learn exactly what I need to do to get into the coffee trading business. I could make a life out of it. And my roots are starting in a deep ethical consciousness for those whose hard work has been terribly exploited. For the first time out of college I feel comfortable with a plan for what's next. Never before has a discovery in travel felt so permanent.

When my best friend Jordan heard that I was staying and working on a coffee farm, he asked"If I send you money, can you buy me coffee?" and then wired $35 over the internet. Why not? I knew Carlos would be stoked. After shipping out the coffee I let him know:

"I ended up only sending you one big bag of the wild organic coffee from Carlos and Manuel's farm. I also had a bag from the cooperative but the shippings so expensive I had to take it out. Shipping was originally 40 bucks with both coffees in there. But what I sent you is the more meaningful coffee for you to have. If you see those photos of us at the farm, you'll know exactly where it came from. The coffee we picked off the tree was this years harvest from the same organic trees that produced your coffee last year. So in a way we worked to replenish his supply of the organic coffee that we all took home. Super awesome. But it's so much work! It was 5 solid work days to produce the same amount of coffee that would last you and I maybe 2 weeks. At the micro mills there is so much more work involved. But I love it. Imagine a machine quickly printing hundreds of copies of some painting that everyone wants in their home, and imagine if you were to ask for one hand painted instead. How much more should you expect to pay for a painting with character, a painting born from the delicate hands of an artist? This is like the specialty coffee trade today except that a "fair trade" label means the farmer might get only three cents more to the lb than normal. It's hard to know the extra work of their hands is worth so little. I gave Carlos 10 bucks from you thinking he would give me a small ziplock bag of it. But he was so happy to sell it and probably had never been given that much money for his coffee. It was probably two lbs that he gave you from his very best prime stock!"

This is an example of transparacion del café. And whether these organic trees make some high quality stuff or only mediocre, I bet it's going to be the best cup of coffee Jordan has every had. Along with the drink comes a smooth satisfaction that your money has gone farther, and your harmless addiction deeper, than your self.

Carlos emptying our bag of coffee cherries into the pulperia.

The Monteros venture into specialty coffee via the micro mill has been a very challenging one. Manuel was very clear to me that they could not afford such a business risk with only the money from their farms; both of them had to work and save money in the United States to afford it. Manuel worked for 30 years, married, and had his kids in the States before returning home to buy more land for growing coffee. Before that, when he was a teenager, he planted trees on some family land that have now been used to build his house and his micro-mill. He has worked hard all of his life to see the day when coffee can be a sustaining crop.

The first truck load at the micro mill.

Carlos and Manuel plan to finish their micro-mill this year and it will be %100 carbon free. After finishing up some final obligations to the cooperativas they are apart of they will become completely independent coffee producers. Along with the coffee mill they are building a Coffee Park where they will eventually welcome tourist to experience the coffee growing process, hike throughout the coffee plantations, and see a collection of old coffee tools and carts used by their father and grandfather to produce coffee. The Monteros are among the first to build their own micro-mill in the region and they hope to be an example to other coffee growing neighbors. They hope to see in the near future a community of people who can be sustained by their hard work in coffee.

My beautiful girlfriend, Joy, showcasing a few pounds of peaberries which was the result of two days work.

Art on the wheel of a traditional Costarican oxen cart.