27th July 2007

Organic Farming in Costa Rica - How Very Cool 1 reply

Organic Farming in Costa Rica - How Very, Very Cool
by Laura Thieme

As some of you may recall, earlier this summer, I wrote about starting my first organic garden.  I’m fascinated by this, as I’ve now had at least 60 days or organic gardening and haven’t had a lot of luck with this.  My exciting green organic pepper - well, it died, rotted from the bottom.   I have red peppers growing just fine - those are about the only thing that looks like it has potential.  My organic eggplant - well it almost looks too rude to post here - and my tomatoes - well it’s too soon to tell on those.

So, I have a lot of respect for people who know how to farm, and on top of it all, know how to produce organic products.  Collin Street Bakery, a search engine optimization (SEO) client of mine, and world-famous for its fruitcake, has a 3,000 organic and non-organic conventional pineapple plantation/farm not too far from La Virgen, Costa Rica.

This past Sunday, Darlene of Collin Street met me in Miami and flew with me to San Jose, Costa Rica.  We had a driver take us two hours north up through La Virgen, to the Collin Street Bakery Finca Corsicana pineapple farm.  On Monday, Danny Acuna took us on a tractor-led tour through the 3,000 acre pineapple farm.  Collin Street uses the organically grown pineapples for their Harvest Grove pineapples, and the candied pineapples in their world-famous fruitcake.

I learned about some cool things regarding organic farming - like they put plastic underneath all the organically grown pineapples.  Acres and acres of plastic for each plant - all I can think of is “back pain”.   These farmers are well taken care of at Collin Street Bakery, however, regardless it’s a difficult life for a farmer.  Machinery has made it easier, but it’s not easy to bend over and pick pineapples or plant them, I imagine, for hours per day. 

The pineapple you see above is actually not organic.  How can you tell?  The color - as best as I’ve learned thus far.  This pineapple is likely to go to Dole, either for its golden color for fruit, or possibly if it’s too golden, it might be used in their pineapple juice.