Aquiares: Not just a Costa Rican coffee farm
I'm riding a horse through Turrialba, Costa Rica. In front of me are a mother and daughter from Miami and a couple from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In front of them is Christian, who looks after the horses, and behind me is Cesar, who leads bird watching tours. The mother points at a small tree on the side of the road with tight clusters of green cherries clinging to its branches. "What fruit is that?" she says.
I'm slightly taken aback and respond, "That's coffee… this is the biggest coffee farm in Costa Rica." Surely they know they're visiting a globally renowned coffee farm. But then again, the time I spent at Aquiares recently taught me that while coffee is at the heart of this flourishing community, there are many more layers to the operation.
Aquiares is a 935 hectare farm (2,300 acres). It includes a small town with some 200 families living within its boundaries. There's a church, a school, a hospital, a stable with seven horses, a workshop, a small guest house, a general store, and, beginning five months ago, a specialty coffee shop. All of these exist alongside the 'farm stuff': some 600 hectares of coffee, an area growing botanicals like lemon verbena to process into essential oil, an area growing cacao, a wet mill, a dry mill, and large silos for storing coffee, plus housing for seasonal pickers during the harvest.
Aquiares is multifaceted and frankly a little overwhelming. Diego Robelo, the managing director, has responsibilities closer to those of a town mayor than a farm manager.
Mattresses for everyone
On my first evening at Aquiares, Diego was drinking a beer on his porch. He told me about the different problems he was trying to solve that day. "Here's one for you," he said, describing a challenge that illustrated the diversity of issues he faces running Aquiares.
The problem goes like this: every year at harvest, the farm hosts a large number of seasonal workers, generally indigenous Ngäbe people from Panama. Aquiares is a decent employer, paying $3 per picked basket of cherry (triple the standard rate) and providing housing, food, and healthcare. But they have a big problem with mattresses.
People want to sleep on mattresses, but by the end of the season, many of the nearly 500 mattresses invariably need replacing. This means significant cost and waste, which is particularly problematic for a business that is both carbon negative and Rainforest Alliance certified. Diego was exploring solutions: perhaps he could require a deposit that workers get back if the mattress remains in good condition, or perhaps he could find a company that makes biodegradable mattresses. It isn't an easy problem to solve, and it certainly isn't the kind of challenge that comes to mind when you think about farm management.
The future of coffee farming
It wasn’t always like this. A key moment in Aquiares' history came in 1997, 107 years after its founding. That was the year they started allowing people to buy the houses in which they lived on Aquiares land. This marked a significant shift from the previous model where houses were only available to actual farm employees during their employment. Turrialba, the district where Aquiares is located, has two other major employers: Firestone, which makes car tires, and Rawlings, which makes baseballs, plus considerable other agricultural activity (largely dairy). The Aquiares housing programme helped establish the farm as a true community rather than just a seasonal workplace. For the first time, people could live there but work in other industries, many of which are considered easier than coffee’s physical, outdoor labour conditions.
Speaking to Diego on a drive one day he mentioned that one future for Aquiares could be to expand the town and allow businesses to build there, renting and selling land to make money rather than difficult work of coffee which is ultimately reliant on increasingly fickle weather conditions. For him, this isn’t an appealing prospect and he’s committed to making coffee and other farm products work as the central pillar of Aquiares. Still, the dilemma reminds me of conversations with friends in the UK whose families own farms. One friend has long leased a huge portion to a German solar panel company, while another sold a large chunk to property developers. For many people rooted in agriculture the smart business decision isn’t necessarily agriculture. I’m confident that Aquiares coffee will remain a robust business, but still, the alternatives can be sad to think about.
At the end of my trip, Diego and I had coffee in the specialty coffee shop on the farm, while chatting with the café manager, Mariana. While modern coffee farms these days often feature roasting, brewing, and state-of-the-art cupping equipment, a full-blown specialty cafe on a farm is something I've never seen before. I drank an espresso of pulpy, fresh-crop Caturra and tried a pour over made from a varietal developed on the farm, coincidentally also called Mariana. Suddenly, a bus pulled up and the coffee shop went from two customers to twenty. Diego and I jumped up to help Mariana serve the unexpected rush.
The tour bus was full of Peruvian coffee farmers from Cajamarca. They excitedly peppered Diego with questions about which plant varietals he grows along with very specific inquiries about coffee cultivation techniques. While Aquiares clearly contains multitudes, for many people, myself included, it will always be one of the best coffee farms in the world.
Will Davies is relationship manager for Skylark. He also writes for Standart magazine. You can find our current coffee from Aquiares right here.