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Introducing The La Amistad Project for Rainforest Conservation

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Las Juntas

Equinox Edition 1

A Newsletter On Coffee, Sustainability and All Things Green

Vol. 1 Issue 1

Late Breaking News - Costa Rica 2005

From January 20-30, 2005, we returned to Costa Rica to visit our partners and continue our ongoing search for more and better ways to have a positive impact on the environment and our farmers. This year, we came up big, bringing the organic growers or La Amistad into the Café Humana fold. Not only did we find some great new coffee, but it comes from the most environmentally respected farm in all of Costa Rica, has a 10,000 hectare preserve attached to it bordering Central America's largest preserve and has a beautiful lodge for you to come and see our work in progress!

La Amistad

The Partnership

Café Humana is proud to announce a new alliance with Costa Rica's most respected and oldest producer of organic and truly sustainable coffee. By providing La Amistad's fine organic, shade grown and fairly traded coffees directly to the US market, Café Humana will allow a far greater amount of profit to remain with the producers and will also donate all US proceeds to help maintain, and expand existing Las Tablas preserve lands in a public trust. La Amistad is in the process of negotiating with long standing squatters in remote regions of the preserve and is interested in creating and expanding corridors that will connect other preserves and hopefully, one day, create an utterly unique corridor all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Further, your purchase of our coffee will help us expand organic production to other farms in the area that are currently abandoning sustainable, organic agriculture at the urging of a US-based big business. Your help is critical to maintain this area and a way of sustainable living that has existed for nearly a century.

A Visit to La Amistad

We rise early and the same cool wind that had been blowing all night greets us with the warming sun. We'd driven six hours from San Jose the day before to get to this remote corner of Costa Rica – the borderlands of the southwest with Panama, with access to La Amistad International Peace Park . At 479,000 acres (194,000 hectares, 750 square miles, Amistad is 570 times the size of New York's Central Park and nearly double that of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado…and that's just within Costa Rica. The park reaches into Panama protecting another 510,00 acres! Hosting an estimated 2/3rds of all species found in Costa Rica, the majority of it's vast interior has never been seen by westerners and new species and discoveries are made frequently by those who venture deep into these mysterious mountains. Just peering into the hills from the perimeter of this incomprehensibly vast wilderness leaves one with a strange feeling of vertigo, unlike any I've experienced before.

Our visit is to the Las Tablas Preserve, one of many critical buffer zones that surround the park that help make its effective area even greater. It is home to the organic coffee grower's organization that bears the name of La Amistad. A short, stout Costa Rican with salt and pepper hair and beard (who looks remarkably like the late Jerry Garcia), Roberto Montero Zeledon owns this land. This reserve is in his blood. It has been in his family since his grandfather, a naturalist, helped define the border between Panama and Costa Rica some 70 years ago. It was then that the senior Zeledon first discovered this land and fell in love with it. He recognized it immediately as perfect for coffee in every way – elevation, topography, and climate - but at the same time, knew it had to be cared for correctly. He enlisted the support of his best farmers from around the country and, with the promise of land and subsistence for all, began a truly cooperative and grand experiment.

Today, La Amistad holds the title of Costa Rica's oldest organic coffee producer and certainly reigns as its most ecologically impressive producer. Much of its shade-grown coffee is completely surrounded by virgin cloud forest and is managed with impeccable care for the environment. The same families that accompanied Roberto's grandfather so many years ago are still working the land and share in this grand endeavor. Small plots of farmed land are also spread around the preserve providing the most beautifully synergistic example of nature and agriculture you may ever see. In my brief two-day visit, I encountered, hawks, monkeys, wild pigs, jaguarondi, pizote, an astonishing variety of butterflies and an impressive array of other insects and birds unknown to me – all in or very near the coffee.

Our tour this day was hosted by Roberto himself. We jump into a converted Range Rover of African proportions (we'll find such outfitting a necessity later on the remote roads of the Preserve) and begin driving around the coffee field in the immediate area. We find leguminous varieties of shade trees and ground cover that are critical in organic farming for returning nitrogen to the soil and negating the need for synthetic fertilizers.

“When you farm organically you are farming the soil,” says Roberto standing proudly in front of his composting operation. “There is very little you can do with the plant without chemicals so you must make the healthiest soil you can.”

All of the solid waste from coffee processing here is separated and composted to perfection with manure, ash, calcium and other natural elements to produce the critical nutrition needed for healthy organic plants.

From the coffee nursery we watched slowly emerge over two days during its monthly hand weeding, to the beneficio (the facility used to process the coffee to a finished product), La Amistad is a wholly sustainable operation in every sense of the word. A damless hydropower plant keeps them off the grid and hot water is provided courtesy of passive solar heating. An incorporated and beautiful eco-lodge hosts the rare and lucky tourists who hear about this corner of heaven and a newly developed backcountry hut system offering up to five-day circuit hikes on trails through primary cloud forest, along pristine streams and even through some of those remote organic coffee fields draped in wondrous amounts of shade.

We next visited one of those remote coffee “fields” (forest is certainly a more appropriate word) after a 45-minute, rugged four-wheel drive road and two stream crossings. As it turns out, the name of this newly planted area is Las Juntas – the joining. Named so because at the corner of the plot, two rivers meet, forming the Coto Brus River – the namesake and water source of the county we are in. This last fact is one reason that organic production in these pristine headwater regions is so important.

As we crossed the final stream, I looked ahead to see more forest – or so I thought. In a minute, as the rushing of the river fell away in the distance, we entered what was the most beautiful example of shade grown coffee I have ever seen. A near solid canopy of trees on a modest plot of land surrounded by virgin forest, this was Roberto's new pride and joy and one of the stops on the hut system tour offered by his lodge. The coffee plants were vividly green and new, vigorous growth topped each one.

Often just stopping and listening will tell you a lot about the environmental friendliness of a coffee plantation and here, with the distant sound of rushing water, we were adrift in birdsongs and the incessant clicks and whirrs of a million insects.

It's this sort of thing that makes La Amistad so impressive overall. Every use of this land begins from the perspective of conservation. Roberto has no plans to expand production further, nor does he really want to develop his tourism beyond the current capacity of 40 visitors. His hut tours are limited to groups of 12 or under, power comes from a damless hydro source on site, organic produce is grown on site when possible, all water is passively-solar heated and the list goes on. Literally every aspect of what Roberto is doing is secondary to the preservation of the beauty and biological diversity of his family's land.

At dinner that night I met two Canadian women who had stumbled upon La Amistad Lodge at the suggestion of a local guide. Lucky for them - as is often the case, tomorrow they would have this entire corner of the world to themselves.

My brief stay had brought new meaning to the words “shade grown”, “organic” and “sustainable” along with a reminder that all is not lost in the fight for conservation of our precious resources and the ongoing battle to gain sustainability. We ancourage you to visit for your self for just such a recharge!

If you'd like to know more about La Amistad and it's coffee, or arrange for a visit to this undiscovered treasure of Costa Rica, contact us directly at info@cafehumana.com and you can also visit La Amistad on line by clicking here .

Holbrook Travel Partnership Announced

As of February 2005, Café Humana and Holbrook Travel's Educational division have joined hands to create an even greater impact on the education of students and educators worldwide. Holbrook Travel, the leading provider in worldwide educational travel opportunities, will be offering Café Humana coffee as a fundraising opportunity for their groups and 10% of all sales will go toward the endowment of the
Holbrook Foundation For Travel, for educators and students seeking hands-on, educational opportunities around the globe. For more information on Holbrook's amazing travel opportunities click here .

Coffee And Cloud Forests (and Beaches!) Tour ‘06

Are you a coffee fanatic? Love to travel? Interested in seeing one of the most remote and unspoiled areas of Costa Rica? Or maybe you're just looking for an excuse to finally get to Costa Rica?

Well, here is your chance to do it all at once on Café Humana's Coffee And Cloud Forests (and Beaches) Tour. We'll be departing in mid January (final date TBD) for an 11-day tour of the southwestern corner of Costa Rica for a relaxing, educational and mind-blowing experience that will take us from Cloud Forest to Beach. The trip will be led by a Costa Rican naturalist and Jim Meyers, Café Humana's founder, President, and professional photographer.

Jim Meyers created the basic itinerary after a few trips to Costa Rica and finding just the right balance between sensory overload and total relaxation in a beautiful setting. The perfect candidate for this trip will be interested in learning a bit about everything they see but still looking for the freedom to unwind a relax with open-ended days along the coast where you can choose from some optional activities and tours or just unplugging in a hammock on the beach! All proceeds from the trip will go towards preserving some of the places you'll actually visit!

Designed for the adventurous traveler, the specific itinerary will be developed as interested parties make suggestions but stops to be included are the beautiful La Amistad Lodge, farm and Las Tablas Preserve bordering Parque Internacional la Amistad , Wilson Botanical Gardens , Oso Peninsula/Parque Nacional Corcavado , Esterillos Oeste and more. Likely activities include naturalist-guided hiking (possibly a short overnight), sea kayaking, horseback riding, photography, organic coffee tour, surf lessons and more! As mentioned, the trip will begin with some planned activities but as we approach the beach you'll enjoy the freedom to create your own pace and participate in optional activities or just enjoy those amazing Costa Rican hammocks! Drop us a line if you are interested and we'll add you to our mailing list for updates as things are finalized with your input. It will be a trip you'll never forget! Travel services provided by Holbrook Travel.