|
|
 |
||||||||||||||
| Buy Coffee | Buy Wholesale | About the Farm | Photo Gallery | Newsletter | Contact Us | Links |
|
||||||||||||
| Social Conditions | Shade Coffee | Quality Control | Farm Tour | From Seed to Cup | Farm History |
|
When a customer arrives at Selva Negra Mountain Resort and request a coffee tour or a tour to the farm, this is more or less what they can expect to see. Depending on the size of the
group the tour is either on a minibus or on a four wheel truck. From here we go on a road the leads to the next farm, though part of Selva Negra coffee plantation where you can observe the ground cover material used to avoid the use of herbicides, sometimes we use coffee husk, others rice husk, or mulch, or algae from the lake, we use whatever is available. The next step is go though the workers lodging site, here you can see their houses, how they live, some people like to come back here after the tour to talk to the workers and spend some time with the children, they give them candies and such. You will see the new school build this year to replace the original build in 1975. There is also the health clinic, where sometimes we have medical doctors visiting who like to help out for a few hours of free consultation, and some who know us and come back they bring some medical supplies either to give it themselves or to leave at the clinic. There are a lot of small things to see at the workers site, all to many to mention (latrines, garbage disposal area, laundry section, etc.) all of which are operated in sustainable ways. After we continue we head to the animal installations where you see environmental works done with their manure, water used to clean up their areas, and others. The animals kept here are: chickens, geese, ducks, turkeys, quails, pigs, cows, calves, burros, and horses. This area is very interesting to visit as some of the environmental works done here are very unique, such as cow manure used for methane gas production, the excess goes into a pool from where it is taken in steel tank to the coffee plantation to be used as ground cover or as fertilizer, the calf manure is taken to trenches where Californians worms will decompose it together with the pig manure and make top soil to be used for coffee, fruit trees, and flower pots nursery. The manure of the chicken is also used as fertilizer, and the cleaning of all this area (the chicken blood, the washing of pigpen and stable) all this water goes to a lily pond that will uncontaminate the water which is later used on an irrigation system for the pastureland. We continue the tour visiting other coffee plantation areas on different roads, going through beautiful views where people always love to take pictures. There are also a few more lakes to see. After we continue though the pastureland where you will receive an explanation on how the intensive pasture ranching works, the usage of electric fencing with solar energy, the constant rotation to upgrade the small lots of pastureland, the shade planted in the area and why it is useful. These and others will be explained on the tour. We continue to the vegetable field were you will see our experiments on different styles of growing from the square meter patch, to the double digging, and extensive planting. We grow all kinds of vegetables, actually all the seeds we can get our hand on, we grow. There is not much supplies of seeds for non traditional products in the country, so it is hard for us to plant certain type of products which we would love to grow, but we grow all that is needed at the hotel and workers kitchen as well as some others. You will see the making of organic fertilizer, the pesticide and insecticide made of natural products (seed, barks, leaves of different trees). All oriented to grow vegetables organic, healthily and safe. You will enjoy seeing the baseball field where our workers play every weekend. At the farm there are two baseball teams, one for adults and another for the youth, they both play on local leagues. Go will go on miles of inside roads all full of interesting works, a lot of them you may not even have heard of. So we hope to see you there and have the opportunity to show you first hand what we are trying to explain here. It is never the same, there is no way to remember and explain all the details involved in growing coffee sustainably. This is a very diversified farm which you will have the opportunity to see as there are not so many places which will do as much as we do, not only in works, but also is using the byproduct of one for the betterment of the other. |
||||||
|
||||
|
