Organic Coffee and Soil Health in Costa Rica with Finca Rosa Blanca

Written by Rebecca Woolford, Senderos

Costa Rica is known as a green destination and it should be commended for reversing deforestation, producing its electricity from renewables and committing to net-zero by 2050. But this isn’t the whole story.. 

Costa Rica is also a world leader in pesticide use. Large quantities of agrochemicals are sprayed for bananas, coffee and pineapple plantations, all of which goes largely unnoticed by the millions of tourists who visit each year.

From sloth birth defects to polluted drinking water for locals, it’s the BIG elephant in the room we need to be talking about. Furthermore, in 2022, the UN warned Costa Rica it needed to cut back on its pesticide dependence. 

Organic agriculture is said to make up just 1.9% of the country’s farmed area, which illustrates the significance of places like Finca Rosa Blanca.

An organic coffee farm and hotel that understands the connection between soil health, climate change, the environment and our own wellbeing. A beautiful blueprint, an alternative path, not only to inspire and educate guests, but local communities, and the tourism sector at large.

Glenn Jampol (below) is an author, speaker, and proud owner of Finca Rosa Blanca (named by National Geographic as one of the unique lodges of the world). Passionate about travel as a force for good, he is also the chairman of the Global Ecotourism Network. 

 

Senderos’ stories celebrate the positive impact tourism can bring to both nature and communities, and Finca Rosa Blanca is an example of just that. Enjoy the interview below with Glenn!

Take us back to 1985 when the vision for Finca Rosa Blanca was first born, how did it all start? 

“It’s a great story. It all started with my mother, Sylvia, who wanted to create a home in Costa Rica for her family, and friends. She was an extraordinarily charismatic woman who travelled the world profoundly and made friends everywhere she went.

My mother was quite a bohemian, she was a “let’s enjoy life to its max” kind of person. People would say, “Your mother is a glass half full,’” and I would always say, “No, my mother is a full glass.”

A business sense amongst our family was zero. We thrived on emotional optimism and the philosophy  based on reducing our impact on the planet.

So in 1985, we bought a farm in Heredia, one of the premier coffee growing areas in Central America, that was owned by a farmer who was having some trouble due to the low price of coffee, and so he had rented out the farm to somebody who had a motocross business, for motorbikes, and they eradicated  all the coffee, and cut  down all the shade trees – basically everything that was there. That motocross business lasted about a year.

That’s when my mother turned up. It was a field of patches of grass and mud to most, but she saw a great canvas for us to “paint” our ideas on. It is a beautiful area, about 15 kilometres from San Jose and at about a little over 4,000 feet in altitude where some of the best coffee is grown. We fell in love with the community and its coffee culture, the views, and the authentic feel of the place. 

 

In 1987 when we were building the house for the family to live in, we realised about three quarters of the way through – when we were starting to put up the doors and windows – that we didn’t have enough money to finish. So, my mother and the family decided to rent some rooms out – like a bed and breakfast – and generate some income. We would live in some of the rooms and the rest of the building would be for the guests.

We then presented the plans titled, “Proyecto Ecotúristico Finca Rosa Blanca” (An Ecotourism Project, Finca Rosa Blanca) to the tourism board, stating that we wanted to be an official tourism business.

I will always remember that at the tourism board, the head of the planning commission said to me, ‘What does ‘ecoturístico’ (aka ecotourism) mean?’ And I replied… ‘Well, I’m not entirely sure. But I think it means that we try to be kinder to the planet, have a relationship with our community, and reduce our impact like not burying our garbage in the ground.’

I went into this whole explanation, and looking back now, I see that intrinsically I knew what we needed to do. But really I had no idea how to connect the dots and what it all meant.

You know, my father used to say, ‘The only way to eat a whale is little by little.’ So, that’s what we did. 

Sustainability is a term so often heard these days, particularly in somewhere like Costa Rica. This wasn’t always the case was it?

“Yes, Costa Rica in many ways is seen as the leader in this space (along with countries like Bhutan). But in the late 80s and early 90s, we realised there was a trend that had been going on for some time.

Deforestation… Amazing forests across Costa Rica were just being decimated for short-term profit.

Despite having every law known to exist against cutting trees and with permits required, Costa Rica never had the income to pay for the kind of vigilance that we needed to protect the forested areas.

So, after a lot of consideration and contemplation, the government took the position of ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ They figured out exactly how much these private landowners were being paid by international logging companies to cut all these beautiful forests, – which turned out to be something like $9 a tree. They created a fund called the Forestry Finance Fund (FONAFIFO), and Costa Rica implemented a 3% tax on petroleum products such as diesel, kerosene, gasoline, ato finance  this Fund. And they went to private  landowners in the country who had vast amounts of land and were selling their forests and said, ‘We’ll pay you not to cut down the trees, and we’ll pay you every year to keep these trees standing.’

This government project was so successful that since the early 90s, Costa Rica has increased its green coverage by over 30%. We’re now at 53% green coverage, which is really just amazing when you consider that at one point we had one of the highest levels of deforestation in the world!

Some of this increase in green coverage is due to the strong environmental consciousness from responsible tourism businesses, who planted literally hundreds of thousands of trees on their lands where their businesses were (especially small rural hotels). This 30%+ increase is partially due to the regenerative practices from myriad small hotels throughout the country

I think we all can believe that “a tree left standing is worth way more than one that is cut”. This kind of depletion of natural resources to pay for industry is common throughout the world.

At this time, we used our small-scale inn at Finca Rosa Blanca as a learning tool  through trials, errors, and successes. I was part of a group of people soulfully attached to the idea of reducing our footprint and doing good alongside running successful businesses. I still believe that the first and most important pillar of sustainable tourism is financial sustainability, as without a viable business, you cannot continue nor innovate methodologies for increasing knowledge, and a positive impact on conservation ideals.

The rest of the tourism community certainly was pleased and admired our approach and thinking, but their general response was, ‘Who’s going to pay for all of these great things that you’re doing and how do we incorporate that into our business model and still survive financially ?’

And so in the 1980s, Finca Rosa Blanca paved the way for the kind of tourism that was environmentally and community-centred. We considered our waste and water, plus all the myriad practices and elements that make up a very robust, sustainable tourism model that we still use today. Teri and I were one of the pioneers in developing these ideas, proving the concepts, and influencing others.”

Finca Rosa Blanca is an organic coffee farm and a family-run hotel. A big part of what you do is to help reconnect people with the ONE thing they do every day? Eat and Drink.

“Our organic coffee was a great draw from day one: everybody loves coffee. It’s one of the largest traded commodities in the world and a unique common denominator for travelers.  

In the early days, we started taking people on a tour of our organic coffee farm, and through our forest we had planted  native trees. We used to have a little pineapple patch next to the stairs going down towards the little creek which led to the larger coffee field. Often our guests on their way down would notice this pineapple field and would comment with surprise, as so  many people would tell me that they had no idea how pineapples grow!

Sharing with people that pineapples are bromeliads and how they’re related to so many other kinds of plants was intrinsic in our adaptation of the tour as  a journey of agro-ecotourism, where we use agriculture as a tool to help educate people about what they eat and  drink and the connection between supporting a healthy soil and the flora and fauna who survive there (it is our version of permaculture).

One of the questions that we get asked a lot is: ‘Can you tell the difference in taste between regular high-quality coffee and your organic coffee?’ ( I don’t think you can),  but I tell people this…

If you drink 3-4 cups of coffee a day, you’re drinking around 70 gallons of a liquid which is one of the best sequesters of everything in the soil (including carbon). And considering what they spray on non-organic coffee, to keep weeds and competitors down and insects away, you’re drinking 70 gallons of liquid from plants that have been sprayed prolifically with toxins that have been drawn into the plant. It’s scary as hell!

Organic coffee is not only better for the environment but also for our health. Guests at Finca Rosa Blanca leave with a better understanding of how everything is connected and how we are using our business to foster knowledge about farming habits and ways to have a win/win result – good for our pocketbook and good for Mother nature.

Also, we noted that when you have a farm that’s non-organic and is then converted to one that is, the best way to measure  how well you’re doing, is through a bird count. When we started, we had 40 species of birds in our farm fields.

Then we planted several thousand native trees and planted our organic coffee following the  contours of the land to prevent erosion from our prolific rains and 20 years later, we now have over 165 species of birds in the same area.”

 

Conscious travel is an integral part of what you’ve done from day one. As a pioneer of the CST (Certification of Sustainable Tourism) what can you tell us about it?

The story behind the CST (Certification for Sustainable Tourism), was formally created in 1995, and after many years of tweaking and honing was officialy put into action in 1998.  Costa Rica’s tourism arrivals had been growing well from the mid-80s to the early 90s. There were several pioneers, ourselves included, who were changing how tourism in Costa Rica could be presented to global markets.

Combining the kind of authentic and wonderful  middle-of-nowhere and incredible life-changing travel experiences, with the more accessible  and comfortable ones.

As tourism began to grow in Costa Rica in the 90s, the Institute of Tourism (the ICT) hired a consulting company that came to interview various people in tourism, including myself. They asked us to describe who our client was and when they were done with the interviews and research, they determined that what was really drawing travellers from around the world to Costa Rica was not mass tourism, but a personalised, environmentally friendly one.

This consulting company then recommended to the ICT that the best model for Costa Rica to move forward with was a sustainable and regenerative one, which meant tourism based on protecting nature, community-based experiences, and reducing our footprint.

This was a key time because it’s when the government realised that Costa Rica’s future lay in sustainable tourism. And so the tourism board in 1995 with the new administration that came in, decided to create a national certification program to persuade tourism-based businesses to follow certain guidelines. This is the story of what led to Costa Rica’s ecotourism brand and to what it is renowned for today.

I had the great opportunity and was honoured to be one of the people who helped write the standards for the CST. We considered  four key pillars to be good stewards.

• The first pillar was to include a healthy and environmentally friendly environment through sound practices (such as biodegradable cleaning products, reducing your need for plastics, recycling, reducing your carbon footprint and so on).
• The second was to educate people to build a better understanding of the sustainability approach. This includes training staff and clients alike.
• The third pillar was a socio-economic one, which could also  provide training for local people from the community about best practices and why it makes sense to do it this way This led to our policy of only hiring staff from our surrounding area, to foment pride, local knowledge and more efficient employee infrastructure, as well as a method to recycle income back into our local communities
• The fourth pillar was client services; interpretation, “spreading the word about best practices” to our clients, quality and a sense of place, a safe environment, authentic experiences, and so on.

100% of all of our employees at Finca Rosa Blanca are from our local community. Providing good jobs and training to local people is the best sales strategy a hotel or eco-lodge could ever have because they know their homeland best and are proud of it, they want to share this local knowledge with guests.

Over 500 companies participate in the program which is free of charge, as it is run and funded by the Tourism Board (ICT). Today Costa Rica is renowned as the leader in environmental conservation.”

 

What’s next for Finca Rosa Blanca in Costa Rica?

“I’m currently the chair of the Global Ecotourism Network; we’re an umbrella organisation for all the ecotourism associations networks around the world. We have six regional and global areas. Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa and Europe.

I get invited to speak and  to travel to different countries at conferences and provide consultation about ecotourism and regenerative tourism internationally.

I feel like the single most important area to focus on right now is reducing the impacts of climate change. That’s the most serious and existential threat we now face. And because I’m also an organic farmer and work with soils, the thing that interests me the most is the sequestration of carbon in the earth . Which means drawing down excess carbon from our atmosphere and locking it away in the soil.

Soil is the greatest sequester of carbon on the planet.

By working with the soils we can neutralise our carbon emissions and start to bring them down. By just increasing the carbon sequestration in soils globally another 0.4% we can actually start to reverse the carbon excess in our atmosphere. 

So, what’s next? For me, it is regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and focusing on this climate change solution.” 

**The original article by Kiwano Tourism can be found here. 

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