A land full of life, a coffee grown in concert.
Costa Rica’s lush Central Valley teems with life. While the country represents only one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s landmass, it contains 5 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. The country is also home to a coffee industry that has developed a reliance on agrochemicals to increase yields, which could pose a threat to that bountiful biodiversity.

Convincing farmers to make the demanding investment in going organic-even with the lure of greater market prices-has not been easy. In 1997 there were no organic certified coffee suppliers in Costa Rica.

But for the last 10 years, the Lomas al Rio coffee mill has served as a beacon encouraging small farms to grow coffee in ways that help protect the Central Valley’s lush biodiversity and use it to good advantage; in fact birds and insects play integral roles in the coffee-growing process here.

A visit to one of the farms showed us how seamlessly coffee can be grown within its environment, as we walked with farm owner Honorio Quesada, we watched Congo monkeys swing from guarumo trees. Our host told us the trees attract useful weed-eating ants. Less beneficial insects were being kept under control by the noisy piapia- large brown jays-that called from the branches. “They’ve all come back since we went organic,” he said. “The wonder of a plantation like this is that you don’t break up the natural God-made chain of life.”