It's A Bittersweet Day

Yesterday was the last day of classes for us here with EARTH University.  I gave my final presentation yesterday on the sustainability of pineapple production with was for my sustainable agriculture class.  Yesterday we also visited a Jatropha farm which is a plant grown to produce very high quality bio diesel.  There are only a handful of farms right now in Costa Rica growing this product mostly for research right now.  We were able to tour the small 2 hectare farm of Jatropha and learn all about the plant itself and the issues farmers in the future might face with sustainability.

On Wednesday we visited two separate farms and also looked at how sustainable they were.  The first farm we visited was a dairy and cattle farm.  It was a very small scale operation and they marketed their milk to  Dos Pinos which is a very large company in Costa Rica that sell everything from milk, ice cream, juice, and so much more.  We learned there that Dos Pinos had given them lots of new an innovative equipment like a biodigester but the workers had no idea how to use it or what it did.  So although they had the infrastructure and some technology they needed the training to properly use the biodigester, which would provide enough methane to use for cooking and for all the electricity the farm needed.

On the second farm visit was a very small scale farm (about 5 hectares) that had a lot of different animals like sheep and chickens, but what the farm made it's money on was a rare horse breed.  The horses the farmer breeds here are some sort of pure breed horse which is very rare in Costa Rica and he was telling us he can get about $20,000 for one of these horses from an international buyer.  What we learned and saw at his farm was that he had a lot of wasted space.  Places that had empty barns or places that just had piles of trash.  We made a couple of recommendations for the farmer.  One was that he needed to "clean" the place up a little bit and we told him that if he did that he might have more horse buyers.  Another was that he needed to start composting the horse manure.  The nice thing about this farmer is that he is starting to work with EARTH students and is very eager to learn about how to improve his farm.

Today we will have our last half day together as a group and from here everyone is dispersing.  In order to celebrate being done with classes we are going back to the beach, I am getting spoiled here 3 beaches in one week!  6 of us will be traveling to San Jose this afternoon to stay in a hostel and  3 of them are flying out tomorrow.  Ashley and I will be spending Saturday night also in San Jose and will be meeting our professors at the airport when they arrive on Sunday. 

So the first phase of our trip is complete and now I look forward to the University of Missouri Forestry Professors joining us here for a week!