Plant The Trees
In this podcast, we'll talk about all things agroforestry and what you need to know to plant, grow, and monetize your trees.
Plant The Trees
Agritourism and Agroforestry in Costa Rica — with Scott Gallant
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Costa Rica has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Quite a few years ago now, they dissolved their military and placed their focus on services. Not just education and public health, but ecosystem services. Water quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity, weather stability…
Scott Gallant is an agroforestry practitioner based in Costa Rica, and has worked there for over a decade. Today we dove into the agriculture, agroforestry, and agrotourism of Costa Rica. We talked about how trees create experiences, and how recreation might be the most accessible ecosystem service for farmers.
We talked syntropic farming, and making it accessible. Understory and overstory tree crops, perennial vegetables, how we experience some of the best food you can grow.
How do you design agroforestry for a hospitality operation? Where is the overlap between agrotourism in Costa Rica, The United States, and Italy? Without further ado, please welcome Scott Gallant.
Costa Rica is a tropical country, just north of Panama, and it has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Quite a few years ago now, they dissolved their military and placed their focus on services. Not just education and public health, but ecosystem services, water quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity, weather, stability. Scott Galant is an agroforestry practitioner based in Costa Rica, and he's worked there for over a decade. Today we dove into the agriculture, agroforestry, and agro tourism of Costa Rica. We talked about how trees create experiences and how recreation might be the most accessible ecosystem service for farmers. We talked in tropic farming and making it accessible, understory and overstory tree crops, perennial vegetables, and how we experienced some of the best food you can grow. How do you design agroforestry for a hospitality operation? Where's the overlap between agro tourism in Costa Rica, the United States, and Italy? Without further ado, please welcome Scott Galant. Scott, welcome to the Plant the Trees podcast. You're originally from the United States, but you've lived in Costa Rica for 18 years now. How would you describe the climate and the forests of Costa Rica?
SPEAKER_00Costa Rica is it's very different from where I grew up in Ohio. Um, it's one of the most alive places I've ever been. Um and so it's a place that the topography informs a lot of this place. It's like uh if you crumpled up a paper ball and threw it on the ground, that's what it feels like here. And so as you as you move from the coast to the Central Valley and cross some of the uh kind of the Continental Divide mountain range and those other mountain ranges, you get these vastly different ecosystems. Uh and it's kind of famous for that, where within a two-hour drive, you move through cloud forests, you end up in kind of a the dry tropical forest that today because of deforestation and cattle feels like a savannah ecosystem. And then quickly you can be in, you know, pretty close to pristine mountainous rainforest that is just you know defined by really rivers and waterfalls and and life. So it is a place of trees, which I think is one of our great connections. And so there's, you know, I think Coast's done about as well as any country in the world of like protecting trees and trees as part of culture and conservation here. And you know, I'm sitting here, I'm looking at an avocado tree that was probably planted 30 years ago, receives no attention, and probably every three years has a bumper crop. And so it's the beauty of the tropics that things grow a bit on their own, which in the agroforestry world has has pros and cons. You have to be pretty involved, and sometimes it's very fast, um, sometimes too fast in a way. But that's um, yeah, that's this place that I spent the last 18 years of my life really getting to know the land and and how the ecology in this place works.
SPEAKER_01And you were on the Pacific side for a while that has a dry season, then back to the Atlantic side, which is human year-round, and now you're you're back on the Pacific side.
SPEAKER_00That's correct. Yeah. So my first nine years in the country were at a project fairly well known called Rancho Mastatal, where I kind of cut my teeth in all of this and just was like on the land every day with a machete and a weed trimmer and no phone, no computers. Uh it was good good times. My attention was very focused. And yeah, it was kind of classical monsoon tropics, so about eight months of the year wet, and it could be very wet. We could get over 6,000 millimeters of rain in a year, and then we'd have three, four months of a dry season. And then I spent six years on the Caribbean slopes on the foothills of a lot of the volcano range over there. And that is more or less wet year-round. You get these little moments of a dry season, but they're very sporadic and and because of climate change, even more sporadic than in the past. The the patterns that people would rely on in the past are more or less have dissipated. And that was an amazing experience to just be in first volcanic soil where things are very happy. Um, and I don't think I've ever been in a place. I I doubt I'll ever live in a place again where things grow so well and there's so much life. And then for the last two years, I've been in what's we call the dry tropical forest, which is one of the like tropical ecosystems that's disappearing the most around the globe that's kind of in danger through a lot of deforestation. It it has a it lends itself toward cattle production, and we're kind of on the southern edge of it, and it goes up through Guanacaste and then up into Nicaragua and other parts of Central America. And the dry season here extends for it can get closer to six months. Uh, five months is probably more more common.
SPEAKER_01And when the trees are cut down on that dry Pacific side, they have a harder time coming back. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like if we were to, you know, use the tool of the brittleness scale, right? From from holistic management and Alan Savory's work, it is a much more brittle environment. There is definitely humidity throughout the year, but it's probably I would say the speed is about half of what we would find on like the Caribbean slopes for for forest regeneration. It will become forest again. What we found is that if there are remnant forest edges, it's much easier for the seeds to kind of creep into the pasture, basically, and compete with these improved pasture grasses. And that's where we'll see sites come back much quicker than you know, farms that have been really almost completely denuded of trees, which which sometimes we we enter into that world professionally, you should say.
SPEAKER_01And you mentioned cattle ranching. I'm familiar with a decent amount of cattle ranching in Nicaragua, just as the status quo of agriculture, but I've heard that Costa Rica is much more diverse in terms of the crops it produces. Could you tell us a little bit about the general agriculture of Costa Rica, for those that are unfamiliar?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so Costa Rica, I think like that conversation, it really has to start with coffee. So we have this, of course, like wonderful agroforestry crop, very, very classic shade grown coffee. And well, why we start with that thinking about this country is that it defined a lot of the early economy, um, like post-colonial years, and Costa Rica is considered a bit unique in its colonization patterns. And part of that was due to the fact of the industry of coffee being born and a lot of different families being able to make a livelihood with coffee. And you ended up with what historically looking back was like a strong middle class, I think we would say from like the the US terminology. And from there, we started having crops like the bananas get introduced in in kind of the United Fruit Company, Chiquita, and all sorts of crazy things with that that brought the railroad and inroads into the country and things of that nature. Cacao did move up the Caribbean coast in its migration from um really like Venezuela up to Mexico. And there's still a lot of debate in the cacao world about like where cacao is native to, but I think generally speaking, it's considered to have moved north. And so the Caribbean slopes have these, especially the southern Caribbean, a long history of indigenous um cacao cultivation. And they're still like if you go into the forest in the Caribbean slopes closer to the coast, you're walking through a forest, you're you're often realizing that these are old 50, 60, 70-year-old cacao trees that really don't produce anymore. They're in deep forests. But those would those would be like the oldest kind of agroforestry practices outside of indigenous agriculture here, which was there were settlements. It was much more sporadic, um, much more nomadic. It was um like from a bigger pattern level, Costa Rica's is this isthmus, you know, with Panama really and and Nicaragua, and and so it's this place of culture's connecting, of trade, of movement, and it was less a place of larger settlements. Today, the implications of that and how we see agriculture now, it's really dominated like a lot of tropical countries, like sugarcane's big, which is a pretty gross industry. Pineapple's big, which is a very like for us, it's very tied into the drug industry, like Narco World, and does does touch into that industry in Costa Rica. The bananas exist. Um, they've been a lot have been replaced by African oil palm. And then coffee and cacao continue to be export industries that are still generally controlled by like families and less by corporations. And there's lots of struggles in that because they still are commodity crops, they're still price takers. And that's that's a big, very interesting conversation. But those are the main agricultural industries here. There is rice production, there's bean production, you know, vegetables and things like that, but it's it's really dominated by those crops.
SPEAKER_01So even if they're industrial perennials, the idea of perennial crops being a mainstay of the economy is really familiar. On the note of the drug traffickers mixing in with pineapples, I heard that for a while they were storing drugs inside the pineapples or hiding them inside the pineapples in order to ship them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think that's this is real. You know, it sounds like a like like do they really do that? And my understanding is it's true. And in the as the border gets closer to Nicaragua, it definitely becomes very poor. There's very few government resources invested in there. And so there is an increasing influence of the narco industry in kind of the North Caribbean side of the country. That's pineapple, it's probably the most like devastating crop in this country. Um, when you see its effect on community, on on water. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty rough to see the the monocultures of that for sure. And also to get to your question a bit, there is this beautiful culture of working with with tree crops still and with perennials. And I think that has is a pattern language that's alive here and people connect with, and it's something that from our perspective of professional work and education, um, is something we're really able to play with and that we get to enjoy in our work as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think we can dive into some different understory crops besides the uh coca vertically integrated value-added supply chain that is present in that area of the world. Yeah, you mentioned cacao and coffee as understory crops. There's oil palm. I'm not sure how much of an overstory crop that is. You have bananas as an early successional uh perennial crop. Call it how much call it citrus or breadfruit do you see there? You mentioned avocados earlier.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's small. There's been a big push to get breadfruit growing and develop a breadfruit industry. Um, some close friends of ours have really been making efforts in that, but it's still a very niche thing. And, you know, it's been very interesting. There was breadfruit cultivars that were selected from, I believe, Hawaii and Polynesia, and then were in vitro propagated and brought to Costa Rico. We we've planted a lot of these on farms, and it's been very interesting because a lot of them have struggled compared to kind of the the criollo, like the ones that have been here for a long time that not really native to this place, but have adapted to this place. And so we introduced all these amazing dwarf cultivars and cultivars without seeds and that are bigger. And they have mostly been decimated by root rot that's coming from some combination of like a fusarium fungus, um, and probably some whole complex of fungi bacteria issues. And so that's been a struggle with the breadfruit. So there's been, I think for the folks working in that a big shift back toward the like varieties that have been here a long time, even if they're maybe less productive or the trees are much bigger, which is interesting. Citrus is small, it's very Yeah, it's very smallholder plots. You know, maybe you'll see some farms of a couple, maybe the biggest, like 10, 20 hectares. I I've never seen a citrus farm bigger than that. It might exist somewhere, but I think it's a a lot of imported um citrus here.
SPEAKER_01And just further working through all of these different crop options that you have, something unique to the tropics, to the Caribbean that I've seen in the Dominican Republic, namely is this perennial squash, chayote or thaiota. And we don't really eat that much in the United States, or I don't see it very often except in very specialty markets. That's uh that's a perennial. There are massive trellised farms of that. Do you see that working into perennial systems?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Like I think the tropics has this blessing of what we could call perennial greens, perennial vegetables, and so like the the tip the growing tips of the chayote or the fruit, and then there's this whole world of you know, kind of permaculture plants, yeah, katuk and chaya and ballet and these edible hibiscuses, and it really goes on and on. And often when we're working with clients, it's the first kind of first guild of plants we'll introduce. Um mostly because you can plant like a single cutting of one of these plants, and within six months that cutting becomes 10. A year later that those 10 become 100, and suddenly you have the base of your your homestead salad forever infinitely, and they're usually semi-domesticated or closer to like the wild genetics. And so their nutritional profile is is significantly more beneficial to us than like the random lettuce that we're buying from the organic market or the arugula or something like that. And so that's often the first package of plants we'll bring into a new homestead, which some of our clients are on that scale. And yeah, figuring out how to I think the biggest challenge with a lot of these is just figuring out how to commercialize them. Like if we're thinking about them on a bigger scale, package them, find markets for them, et cetera. They definitely fit more easily, and I think classically in kind of the tropical home garden homestead scale.
SPEAKER_01So you have an overstory that produces fruit and starches, you have an early successional strata that produces other perennial vegetables and other fruit. You have coffee as an understory, you have more perennial vegetables, and when you add in biomass crops, you get something like syntropic agroforestry.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah, following your path. Yeah, exactly. I think we could probably pretty easily pick 40 species that wherever you are in the global tropics are going to work regardless of your context. Like there's a there's enough patterning as I've been maybe talk about this, like spending more time in Italy. I'm learning how the microclimate changes very rapidly around the Mediterranean. The tropics doesn't have that in the same way. Like the constant heat and humidity means that the local biodiversity is incredible. But if you travel 100 kilometers north, south, east, or west, it's still very similar of what's going on. And so these crops really can be moved around the world with a bit more confidence. And so we have, you know, the classic fruit trees, the mangoes and avocados. We get trees that produce these starchy things. So we have like pehi baye, breadfruit, jackfruit. We get into things that in Latin America we're not that familiar with, but in like the Philippines, we start finding peely nut and okari nut and these kind of exotic things that happen in Thailand and and we're parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. They're like, oh, what is like what is safu? It's called African avocado. And so there's all those all the fruit collectors that are out there like doing some behind-the-scenes work, bringing that in and looking at genetics. And then we can layer those with some of these understory crops. I think tea is another big one that I it's my favorite plant right now. I'm exploring. We have all those kind of layers of medicinal plants that would work in this the ginger and turmeric, culinary spices, vanilla, black pepper. And then probably the big group that we work with in the early, early succession and that we didn't mention are the tropical tubers. So cassava, sweet potato, all the taros, which is like a a word for a huge diversity of plants. Um, yams, tropical yams, whole crazy world as well. That in Costa Rica we don't eat so many of them, but parts of the world's huge part of the diet. And so this is what we start putting together in conjunction with timber trees. And then in centropic farming, we really start bringing in things that it's a compared to like more classic agroforestry or agroecology in the tropics, we do we work a lot with grasses. And so we introduce some of these pasture grasses into our agroforestry systems and and that for some folks I think is very uh makes them nervous because usually trees and grasses don't they, you know, it's a there's a competition, there's a tension there between these two ecosystems, and we're we're striving for integration. And and so that ends up being kind of the palette of the landscapes that we're we're planting here in Costa Rica with clients outside of Costa Rica.
SPEAKER_01So we have starches, we have coffee. That sounds like a decent breakfast, you have chickens in the understory for your protein, probably some silvo pasture, turning that herbaceous grass into protein. Would you say that the tropics could use a little bit more protein production, or how how does that work into the paradigm of agroforestry that we're looking at here?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. It's probably the trickiest piece here, you know, from the plant world, you know, avocados, coconuts are kind of the lifesaver, but it's all, you know, everything has its complications, right? It's not just so simple. Every one of these crops, if we look at it just from the perspective of how is it grown commercially and processed commercially is a whole world. And so when you put five of these together, or let alone 20 of these crops together, the amount of technical knowledge required, the amount of skill in just harvesting and seasonality and stuff becomes complex. And so the protein piece is really tricky. The last time we saw each other was at Fincoluna Nueva, um, however many years ago. And that's a project, a hotel combining a farm, kind of an agritourism operation. And they spent a few years really trying to figure out the protein piece and looking at pigs in particular, and then chickens. And I think where you are in the world, this can be much easier. One of the maybe challenges of specific to Costa Rica, because conservation has been so successful here, is that we have a lot of predators. And that's been our biggest challenge. Introducing the animal protein component is simply the predation of animals from weasels to birds to jungle cats. Like we had a mama pig who we spent a year looking for specific genetics. She got pregnant, she had babies, and she was ripped out of the pen by a puma. And so, you know, these are those are setbacks in this world where, you know, I think in the tropics, these the animal genetics is not as diverse. There's not like heritage breeds that are easily available. You're if you're in that world, you're really at the cutting edge. And especially in a place like Costa Rica that's very small, the markets aren't developed. That push to do something different is more limited than maybe if you're in parts of in Brazil or Mexico, these larger countries, there's just a bit more of everything. But those have been some of the big setbacks we've had and struggled with to get the protein piece into these systems. And I think it's a bit of a a holy grail is kind of aligning these worlds together and these skill sets together.
SPEAKER_01For now, carbohydrates seem pretty reasonable, but I'm I remember you mentioning that even river otters came out of the woods and were eating all of the tilapia out of the pond that you had dug. And that that's an unfathomable challenge for us. We have to deal with. Coyotes, yes, sometimes bears, mostly deer eating all of the trees.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess the the deer seems annoying. We we lost a big avocado plantation to deer here as well. So we can we can bond over that. They recovered the trees. But yeah, the the sheer pest pressure here, not even getting into the like fungal bacterial pest pressure that's real, but you know, peach palm. This is amazing native palm, big staple crop uh in throughout all of Mesoamerica, really. One of our projects, we were told not to plant it because the birds would just decimate it. And like, no one can grow this because the birds eat all the fruit. We planted it anyway, and it's worked very well, which tends to be my like I don't know, it's an interesting balance of like when do you listen to local knowledge and when do you be like, I don't know, maybe we can do this different. Or like this should work here, and and you take that risk. But birds, birds can wipe everything out. The cacao, well, squirrels come through and are major problems. And we have because of the strong conservation ethic, we have very strict hunting laws. And so technically we couldn't even like kill a squirrel in a cacao orchard, and maybe that's good, I don't know, but it does make production uh genuinely difficult.
SPEAKER_01You mentioned conservation there. Uh uh, it would be great to shift a little bit to ecosystem services in Costa Rica and then come back to agriculture and agroforestry. Costa Rica is pretty unique in provisioning ecosystem services. Could you walk us through this a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's really an amazing place from where, like how it built that ethos compared to neighboring countries. And one of there was many seeds that kind of germinated of this in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. One were this group of Quakers that came down from Alabama, and they were pacifists and were refusing to participate in the Korean War in the United States. And so four families traveled, like pretty rough travel throughout Central America looking for a place to relocate to not get drafted into the Korean War. And they settled in Costa Rica in this place called Monte Verde, which they visited a few times. It was like beautiful sunny land. Like, oh, this is perfect. They happened to go on days, and this happens to clients all the time when it was sunny, because actually they moved into a club forest. And like proper, proper, like one of the rainiest places in the country. But they set up shop there. And first, what they did was they cut down all the trees and they started growing pasture grasses and they started a dairy. And in that process, they started paying attention to what was going on in the land. And a few of them began to realize how much biodiversity was there and what was perhaps being lost in these, like just flagrant use of chainsaw, chainsaw, chainsaw, chainsaw. And one of the first might have been the first private protected piece of land was founded by this Quaker community, a specific family in that community. And that pattern was what really started triggering the protected land throughout Costa Rica. And I think in conjunction with Costa Rica abolishing the military and really putting government resources towards social services really in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, that's it's very different today, led to this conservation ethic. And there's a lot of studies that show how much forest has come back in Costa Rica. There's a real debate about whether that was actually based on conservation policies or whether that was based on people migrating from rural land to the cities and uh farms simply being abandoned, kind of going through their cycle of trees get cut down, crops get planted, land gets more degraded. So then they put cows on it, and eventually even that doesn't work anymore. And so they leave it and now it becomes forest again. That's probably the predominant driver of the reforestation of the country, realistically. All that being said, we have these pretty interesting government programs for protecting land, for protecting trees. I would say there's kind of two things that happen. One is we have strict environmental laws around protecting certain trees, waterways, what you can cut down, how close you can cut down to certain areas. And those are protected by basically a fine system. Whether it's in forests, there's bribery, there's corruption, like that's a big conversation. And then the other piece that's interesting that Costa Rica really pioneered were these environmental service payments, where they I should know this exact numbers or the exact details of it, but my understanding is we basically tax imported gasoline, a small amount, and that money gets put in a fund. And for many years, that fund was used to pay for planting of trees, reforestation programs, also timber programs. So a lot of the what gets calculated as reforestation is really like teak timber plantations. So there's like, you know, there's the greenwash of Costa Rica, and then there's the reality underneath. But overall, it's been a program that a lot of people have relied on that often pays like a per hectare amount. And that's evolved to include things like living fences, which is kind of a classic agroforestry technique in the tropics. Glarosetia, et cetera. Exactly. Yeah. It's evolved to include some agroforestry. Today the program is less solvent, and I think it's harder to get accepted for funding. Um, I don't hear about those opportunities as much, but 20 years ago was a real driver of, I would say, many projects and their early viability, where you could buy land, protect it, and get paid enough money to at least maintain the fences and the trails, and perhaps that would birth a you know a nature-based tourism industry. And I think the country was overall successful in that.
SPEAKER_01And it seems like that's largely been successful in terms of critical mass of reforestation. And the way that they did that checks out with how an economist, a neoclassical economist, would say that something like that would have to happen, in that you had a single payer, i.e. the government, of ecosystem services. It's possible to tie in ecosystem services purely to the private sector, but a lot of that is done via positive externalities or positive consequences of practices that are economically viable on their own. I remember you mentioning on the regulation side last time that if you hear a chainsaw in a riparian zone, then or next to a river, then just kind of alarm bells go off within the community. So it seems like the combination of regulation and social norms and those original payments for reforestation for water quality ecosystem services worked out. I want to tie all of this into tourism because Costa Rica it often seems like the Switzerland of Latin America. It's safer, it's a tourism hotspot, uh, it's also beautiful. So safe, beautiful, interesting, great food. All of this is in part because of that intact ecology that you've worked in and worked us through.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Would you say that there are tangible ways that you can connect the forest to the tourism economy on a countrywide scale?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think completely almost everyone that's uh I would say everyone that's coming to Costa Rica is is coming here because of the nature. And when you come here, you're either going to a protected beach area, you're going, you know, into a river to Rath or to do canyoning or to go visit a waterfall. You're doing some sort of bird watching or a wildlife tour in the parks. And it is a very curated experience. Often it's not, it's isn't a place where you're gonna go and like do a wilderness trek with a map and and go, you know, hike for 10 days. It isn't that. It's it's different. Like you'll go into the national park and it can be cement paths to the volcano crater, you know. For for some people, that can be, you know, it's not really what they're looking for. I think for many people, especially families, that the safety piece really ties in as well. And it just becomes an easy place for people to come. And I think there's a lot of value in that. I think it's a place that for many people, when they're younger, they'll come here maybe as like a teenager or something. They have some of their first like awe-inspiring connections to nature, and I think the country's very good at cultivating that in the tourism. There is a lot of greenwashing, there's a lot of stuff that is weird, and you know, every place has you know the the two sides of coins, but that that tourism drives this country, and you know, we are not able to do a farm or agriculture project without it being tied into tourism. It's almost impossible, and and there's very few like organic or regenerative farms that don't bring those two things together today because it's such a an opportunity, and people come here looking for that in general. It's often secondary, like they're gonna visit a cacao farm or a coffee farm. It's like a bonus, it's maybe not the driver, which is something that we're professionally interested in shifting. We want people to come to Costa Rica to go to a cacao farm, like they'd go to Italy to go to a vineyard. Um, right now it definitely is secondary in that, but it's still these little, these little moments of connection, which I think is what this place does very well.
SPEAKER_01So they come down to see a sloth and then you feed them incredible chocolate, and that just becomes part of the experience.
SPEAKER_00Becomes part of the experience, and and your your your hope, I think, and what this place's hope is that that stays with people. And and next time they're in the supermarket, like wherever in the United States, and they have a choice between like Hershey's sugar versus a dark chocolate bar from the tropics somewhere, they're gonna pick that. And and that's like that's a very simple thing, but it I think those are the acts that like move people toward more radical life paths and be and more dedication in the way that you know we've probably had similar experiences somewhere along the lines in our in our youth as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I grew up at a summer camp and that was inspiring to me. It was kayaking in the main wilderness that just opened my eyes to how water quality from an intact forest is so much better than water quality in a river running through an agricultural field, getting, I say, a nasal enema of clean water versus cow manure in white water is a pretty visceral experience. On the recreation front, we often say that recreation is an ecosystem service because people will inquire about payments for ecosystem services and recreation is the ecosystem service that a landowner has the most influence and control over, regardless of where they are. So if you're looking for payment for ecosystem services, it's going to be largely inaccessible to obtain carbon payments unless you're on a massive scale and in the tropics. But whether that's on just a pure baseline of, say, hunting into, I don't know, dog walking, camping, hip camp, those are some of the status quo forms of recreation in the United States, it's a very accessible way to connect the aesthetic sensual experience of a farm to the economy that is in a way additional to food. I'm thinking about the vibrant experiences that syntropic agroforestry and really any sort of agroforestry create. If we zoom in, could you tell us a little bit more about the experiences of people in agroforestry?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think the example I mentioned earlier, the place Finkoluna and the Wave, they'll be happy that I'm mentioning them. Um is a one of the best examples of farm tourism here in Costa Rica. My experience there, like watching guests. I I lived and was kind of administering the project for about six years. And you're just in awe of people being surprised by what comes off of a tree and that they can eat this thing off of the tree. And I think on a on a very simple level, that's very powerful of grabbing, like, you know, an unona fruit, a beriba, and and you pull it off and it's warm from the sun, and you you just like rip it open and someone eats that. And you know, I've been here a long time, and so I take that for granted. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't know, just it's like a normal thing you do, but it's really nice to be reminded of that, like to drop back into the beginner mindset. And so, from like kind of with the tourism piece, I think that is very tangible. And a lot of places have little kind of like fruit tours. And then some places try to do it more serious. And so we have another project we've been working on for years called Cinco Ramas. It's a spice farm, and they're opening up a new, they basically took an old timber farm that was at the end of its cutting patterns, removing everything, and moving into a botanical garden. And so we've been installing half hectare, 5,000 square meter blocks of centropic agroforestries, very technical system, right? At a time. And that's more focused on that work, the education we do around it in bringing Costa Rican farmers, agronomists, um, really anyone working professionally around agriculture, which is so many things. Like we just had in the last course two folks that are very involved with development in the capital, where they are converting the like last giant coffee farms into what will be cities, but they want these cities to be connected to food and farming, like literally city, like a hundred hectare city. And so they would come to these courses and came to these, this just this last course we did there. And what we really see, the experience of people getting involved with this type of agroforestry is I think falling in love with the complexity of it and being challenged to get beyond maybe the view of farming as this, you know, a shade potoro and erythrina and a coffee. And we're really trying to push them toward understanding how these ecological processes work, ecological succession, how photosynthesis works and why and how we design for that. And man, you get people excited. And I don't pretend that centropic farming is like everyone should do it or is the solution. And I think people have to take from these different methodologies and apply them. Um, I think we're very similar in that way. But I really see people kind of fall in love with the diversity and the potential of that. And so that's a piece I I really enjoy. I think there's an aesthetic as well, which I think is really important. Um, that we need these farms of the future to be stunningly beautiful. They have to like call out a deeper human aspect, or you you move through it and you're like, this is what I want to be in. You know, maybe that's here is walking in the shade and consuming food that comes from a comfortable environment. And we're trying to replace some of the drudgery of agriculture, which in the tropics is really a lot of weed trimmer work, a lot of work. And, you know, even on in conventional agriculture, here is you know, applying herbicides and pesticides. Like, how do we replace that with diversity, density, management, pruning, observation, thoughtful design? And when people get a glimpse of that, you just see the light bulb go off and you see people get really excited. And so that's a big part of, you know, uh outside of the tourism piece, like how we're trying to kind of connect everything, integrate everything, and bring agroforestry, keep it alive in this country. It is alive with coffee and cacao, um, but with climate change, there's a lot of complications with these commodity markets. Like it doesn't work for people anymore. And and everyone knows this. It's not we didn't figure this out, of course, but we are presenting what I would loathe to call a solution, but it's definitely what I believe something to explore that that has potential.
SPEAKER_01One of the most visceral benefits for me of agroforestry, not in the trop, not only in the tropics, but I think this is really underrated, is that I didn't have to wear sunscreen in the forest. Because you have to call it shade grown cacao, but you also have shaded experiences where you have all the benefit of the tropics and the humidity, and it's it's been freezing here this winter. Uh like it it's the coldest winter in 20 years here. Come visit. Yeah, for real. Um but yeah, just the uh experience of being in an agroforest seems so much more sensually and aromatically pleasing than being out in a tilled field.
SPEAKER_00Like I I think there's there's so uh like the human connection to trees every uh everyone, it's a very broad statement, but people fall in love with trees, and uh there's I think there's a piece for me. Like I didn't anticipate getting into this world. I have a background in economics. Like I came to Costa Rica to play with like bamboo and mud and stuff, but it was the act of planting a tree seed that's you know the size of a dime, and to realize like this is gonna live for a hundred, two hundred years, and it's gonna produce I don't know, a million babies. And it's the the infiniteness of that. And and I I really think with these systems, these agroforestry systems that are beautiful and thoughtful and in fit place and have purpose and are hopefully financially viable, which like you're better at that than we are. Um, we definitely are like more experimental, I think. But people get called to them, and it only leaves me more and more convinced that this is the type of agriculture I want to see around the world.
SPEAKER_01I think I have two relevant follow-up questions here. One is for farmers that are thinking about agroforestry, agritourism, and integrating more with people, and the other one is probably from the perspective of a hospitality manager. The first one, we see a lot of farmers' trend towards the interest in things side of the spectrum, in that the engineering types, not always, this is definitely a not always thing, but as agriculture becomes more mechanized, you have people that self-select into it because uh it involves much more mechanization. And there is not always, but there's often a trade-off or a compromise between the inclination to be a gearhead or the inclination to be someone that is called a nurse or a teacher or an educator that's very people focused. And for those engineering and machinery-inclined folks, are there any facets of this integration into the people side of things that you found as more accessible?
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Yeah, that's a cool question. What you're speaking about is very true. Um, I think like I'm useless with machines. So guess what? I've never approached doing this on a commercial scale where I'd have to bring machines into this. If that makes sense, it's a self-selecting piece. So, like, how do you bridge those worlds and bring them together? And I I think in my experience, thinking about teaching and the storytelling, perhaps, of this, I think as long as people are genuinely excited about what they do, and I think maybe there's a piece of being open source that like a lot of these tinkers might be inclined to be inventor mindset. There might be a little bit of inclination toward, I created this saying, I'm not going to share it with the world. And I think if you're a, let's just say a plant person, that's less common because there's this we rely on the seed saving and cross pollinization that is like a very inherit. And so I think if you are in that tinker world, it's like, how do you tie into that same open source cross pollinization mindset? I haven't really thought about this question before, but this is what comes to my mind.
SPEAKER_01It's a difficult question. Yeah. I haven't had anyone answer it extremely succinctly. So yeah, keep keep going.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but I I can imagine, you know, you invent this tractor apparatus and you're like, well, I should sell this and copyright it. And there might be much more power in sharing it with the world in an open source way, like the open source ecology project that's in Missouri. And um I worked on that a long time ago, many, many years ago. And that might be an interesting way for people to bridge this gap. And I think this the machine world is really requires these like micro adjustments of, you know, you're building like in centropic farming, we do this pruning at higher, you know, kind of elevation in the system. We're doing pruning of trees at five meters. It's kind of this awkward height. You're asking people either to get on ladders with chainsaws, which is dumb. You know, like from a you know, outside of a homestead scale, it's like impossible and it's dangerous. Yeah, you don't want to work that into a system necessarily. No, it's you know, if it's just me on my land and like I like climbing trees, that's fine, maybe. But or you have, you know, these kind of awkward like cherry picker, you know, baskets. And so there's people trying to resolve this and find the tool that will allow us to move through a tree row comfortably without compacting the soil, without damaging the understory, where we can quickly get to, you know, the poplars and and prune them at five meters, kind of a tall, I don't know, a tall copice, whatever you call a tall pollard, maybe. And I think there's people all around the world trying to figure that out at the moment. And I'm not sure how good those people are at communicating amongst each other and like sharing their designs. And I think there's there's probably an opportunity there in that world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We can set up a forum about about this in in northern Italy. I guess the the other question, which is is probably a bit more straightforward, is how do you design agroforestry into a hospitality landscape broadly?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, for in our work, we're we're first coming onto a piece of a land, and this might be for a hotel that has a restaurant, that wants a farm to table component. This might be for um a development of 50 homes that wants a farm at the center of it, kind of this classic or becoming more known, kind of agrihood. Um, here we often use the word intentional communities, but a farm at the center, replacing the golf course, so to speak. And first we're really studying, you know, what's going on in the region. And so it's kind of classic permaculture design process of understanding the bioregion, the watershed, and things like that, moving from patterns to details. When we start getting into the weeds of design, one of our big things we will fight for in this space, will advocate for, is it's very common that the farm, whether it's in a hotel or in a development, ends up getting pushed to the most marginal part of the land. And because of the views, because of soil, because of access, all these reasons. And we'll really push to make the farm the center. And there'll be pieces, it's very common, for example, oh, the compost is going to be the compost operation will be stinky. So it needs to be like hidden. We're like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's put this in the center, which means we'll take care of it so it won't be stinky, and now let's celebrate it. And really trying to avoid this kind of hiding of agriculture, it could be as simple as where the workers, because most of the time we're hiring local workers here, they're the ones running everything, where they spend time and eat, people want to put that back behind and hide it. And like, hey, why isn't this in the center instead? And so a lot of our work is about centering the people and the processes of agriculture within the tourism kind of apparatus. Because in our experience, the the guests that come when they get to go and spend time with the local workers and talk to them in like the broken Spanish English here in Costa Rica, like that's as memorable for them as anything else on their trip. And there's like just that bridge that personifies what Costa Rica wants to be, a bridge between the north and the south, the isthmus. So metaphorically, that's very nice for me as someone who likes language and metaphor. And so then beyond that, we really present different types of agriculture to people. Like, hey, what are you trying to eat? That's kind of where we start. Like you have a restaurant. What is the market here? We act as a colander of just filtering out ideas and dreams and hopes. And sometimes we're crushing dreams a little bit. Sometimes we're we're suggesting things. We want to move people toward trees in general because of all the benefits we know about them. But sometimes, like there's many clients I would not recommend centropic farming to, for example, because of how intensive the management is. Maybe they already have good soil. We don't really need to be like focused on soil rehabilitation. And there's clients who have a client up the road here where they have a big market gardening system. There's some trees in it, but it's it's producing annual vegetables. And we know that is what the people there want to eat. And that is what is feeding the community now. And we hope that the trees will eventually feed the community, but we have to like keep in mind that that permaculture principle of obtain a yield. And so with trees, we wait and we wait. And that that can be a struggle for people, that patience. And so these are the different pieces we balance. It's really a study of what people want to consume and what the restaurant, we'll sit with chefs. Um, we'll really interview community members, and we'll we'll be really honest. I think that's really important. Where somebody be like, oh, I want to, I don't know, what's a good example? Yeah, we want to grow the same project, actually, that I was just talking about. Like we want to produce our own chocolate. I'm like, okay. Like, how much land do we have here? We've got this much land, and you want other things in there besides cacao trees. Like, realistically, you need this many cacao trees to produce your own chocolate because you need a certain mass, a certain volume of the cacao pulp to achieve the fermentation results you need to make decent chocolate. And so our work then becomes finding alternative solutions. So, as simple as like, hey guys, why don't we grow cacao and you guys can play with it? But we have all these neighbors that grow cacao, you just buy from them. Like, let's keep this simple. If you really want, like, is it more important to produce chocolate or is it more important to have your community experience cacao growing because it's part of the culture here and you're and you're starting to learn about that, and now you're going to relate to your neighbors better. And so I think as designers, you know, regenerative designers, that is a big part of our work, is challenging assumptions and nudging people in certain directions based on their context, the land's context, et cetera. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I'm hearing the holistic management framework in there, which boils down to determining what you want, which informs what you do, and then understanding what success looks like instead of just pointing at a thing that you do.
SPEAKER_00This same project, they had um a food forest installed six years ago when the community started, and it had no patterning to it. It was just like random hodgepodge of tropical fruit trees. And I think this, for those of you in the tropics, if anyone's listening to this or trying to get into the tropics, like you have to be careful of being seduced by the diversity here. And so we're redesigning this system, and what we're doing is just probably working with staple crops, breadfruit, jackfruit, coconut, pehiwaiye, cacao. Like, yeah, that's it. And and some of the community members are like, oh, but what about durian and da-da-da-da, and peanut butter fruit and blackberry jam fruit? I'm like, guys, stop. Like, do that in your backyard of your little house. But you're trying to grow food for 240 people that will be living here within the next three years, already like 100 people living there. You need these in certain quantities, otherwise, it doesn't, it doesn't work. You won't never invest in the freezer space you need or the dehydration equipment you need and or the grinding equipment you need if you only have two jackfruit trees instead of a hundred jackfruit trees. And so we work on that. It's a yeah, that's a big part of the holistic context, like framework that that we're trying to layer into this design work. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01One topic that seems to repeatedly come up is that there's a lot of ecotourism in Costa Rica. And with that, you have that ecotourism attracting the desire to start more agroecotourism. And you see folks from Los Angeles or wherever else try to start a cacao yoga retreat center and pitch that as novel, innovative, when in reality there there's a lot of that already there. And is there a different way that visitors from the United States or elsewhere can contribute to the Costa Rica experience or perhaps create agritourism where they live?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the first part of the question is there are a lot of these places. There's not a lot, though I would say being very successful. I think people come to this country, and we saw this a lot during COVID. It's calmed down a lot, thank goodness. Um, although we get maybe less clients now. Um, but sometimes that's good too. But this idea that everyone thinks what they're doing is unique. And so that's a word we'll use a lot, kind of from the Genesis group of looking at land and certain certain language we'll use. And so we'll ask clients, like, what is unique about your project? Like, oh, we're going organic cacao and we're gonna have yoga. And it's like that's not unique. Like, I'm sorry. Like, there's there's many other projects doing that. Um, I think one of the things I see here that is really challenging is that a lot of the projects want to be everything. And so they want to be an education center and have commercial cacao production and be a retreat center, and they want a community to form. And that that integration is a beautiful idea, but it's very hard to do. And Costa Rica is an expensive country in the end. Like it's it cost a living in many ways is comparable to parts of the United States, and people don't really realize that. So if you're coming to Costa Rica and you want to tie in to these projects and you want to do so in a way that is kind of good for the world, I think you really have to do your due diligence. And there are lots of amazing agritourism projects in this country that are much more grassroots, um, where it is like a local family that's been doing this for a long time, and you're probably gonna stay in like a rustic cabin with, you know, a mosquito net that's like not super comfortable, like leaning up against your face. And it's gonna be a little bit less than it's you know, it's not gonna look like the Instagram farm that you see. And then probably the biggest piece of advice I'd have for people is get away from the coast. If you're away from the coast, most of the time you're gonna be in a place that is more authentic. Um, the coast is just, it's it just layers, like if we were to order these priorities, it's gonna put wellness and tourism above farming. And it and it's harder to farm on these coastal lands. It's tricky. The weather's different, it gets hot, there's iguanas that want to eat everything, uh, you know, on and on and on. The cost is so high that it is, it's not viable to do agriculture in these lands. It's only viable to build luxury houses. And so getting inland into the mountains of Costa Rica, and there's some amazing old coffee farms, and and people can really spend time on these projects. Um, La Iguana Chocolate is an amazing cacao farm, Macala is really cool coffee farm that's starting off. They have often these like deep family histories. And there is a piece there that I think that's really beautiful to tie into. I think our hope is that one day, you know, you go to a cacao farm and has the same like swagger and and I don't know, the same pull that going to a vineyard has, where it's really considered this like kind of high value. I don't know if elite's not the right word, but we want it to be celebrated in the same way. That's what I want to say. Like, I want cacao and you go to a cacao farm to be celebrated in the same way that you would go to a vineyard in in Italy. And we, being myself and other folks in like the organic cacao and coffee world here, think that's the way to go. And we wish the Costa Rican government would like put more support behind that and things like that. But that's a different conversation. Those are my thoughts on kind of what's happening here and my advice to people.
SPEAKER_01I see a lot of that playing out in a similar way here, in that the the thing that someone who is starting a farm or a farm project or an ecotourism project or an agro-ecotourism venture should really think about is what is most exciting to them in terms of the quality of life that they want and the results that they want to see, and have that inform what it is that they grow and what it is that they do, and how many hours they want to spend managing the trees versus interacting with people versus their flexibility of when they can leave the property and can it be managed by someone else? And uh here on my farm, I have a decent amount of fruit trees that I think it's 20 different species, and some of them uh are in full bearing, some of them are just coming online, so the apples and the the Asian pears and whatnot. And that takes up a good amount of my time, but I've I've chosen that as well. And one of the tenets of how I manage this place is can I turn this off if I have to leave or if I get hurt or something like that? And for that reason, I'm not running a big U-PIC operation or a vertically integrated berry operation. I'm not making black currant juice, uh, even though I do like black currant juice. And I have I just have a running track. It's a mile loop around the farm for dog walking and the local running club to come out and people ride horses there, etc. Cool. Not super common to the horses, but uh occasionally that happens and it's it's exciting. So I guess have you seen projects, call it agro-ecotourism or just agroecology that are really good fits to a manager's desired state, maybe outside of Costa Rica?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you know, Costa Rica's funny if we we compare it to the states, because most of the people that own the land are not the ones working the land. And so the biggest challenge to those things being successful here, uh I think in the end, is uh finding a farm manager who has the skill set that you're looking for to run, like a regenerative operation, um, and believes in that and will accept the wage that you're willing to offer. And the government suggested like the legal minimum wages for you know, organic farm manager who's not an agronomist, maybe that has a two-year degree, is not very high here. Maybe you're paying$1,000 a month,$1,200 a month. It should be more. Some people get more than that, some people get less than that. The number of those people out there who are willing to like relocate to your project in northern Costa Rica and live in the middle of nowhere. Like, like it's beautiful, but it's like to live there is might be rough. You know, there's no amenities, there's it just rains all day long. It's very limited. And so that type of human that would be the bridge in this country, there's just not that many of them. And so that's what we see to be the biggest limiting factor here. Outside of Costa Rica, like I alluded to, like, we're starting to spend time in Italy. And Italy is, of course, the heart of agritourism in many ways. You know, it's like what what people go there for uh so much. And I think as I spend more time there, it'll I'll have a better understanding of these rhythms. This is like so my my partner's family bought land 15 months ago in southern Italy, and we're we're launching this small retreat center. We planted our first orchard there. And so I'm in the midst of like answering these questions for myself. So I haven't been there for three months, four months. We hired some folks who knew what they were doing to come and and like give care to the land. I will get back, I'll probably hire them again. And I'm not getting paid yet. You know, we're spending money on these people. And one of our big questions is like, you know, we have three hectares. We planted 2,000 square meters. We could probably plant two hectares in total, 20,000 square meters. It's like, like, of course, I want to plant more. I want a fig system, I want chestnuts, I want to do an olive orchard, I want a vineyard. But uh everything you're asking about, this capacity, and do people have time and and really understanding this? Does it make sense? And and it might not. We might just arrive at a place where it's like, hey, the rest of the land, maybe we just do a very simple agroforestry system because we are in southern Italy in a land of tree crops and agroforestry. It's it's very alive there. It doesn't have to be this super complex multistrata system that that I adore, but we're we're navigating that at the moment. I'm navigating that personally. And my biggest advice for people is that I'll tell this to people a lot. Like the most attractive farm is a tidy farm. I don't think like if people are gonna come to your place and they're gonna see a hundred square foot garden, but that garden is amazingly well run and organized and designed, it's gonna be as powerful as like a 30 hectare CSA that, you know, the scope might impress people, but maybe it's chaotic and there's bad vibes because everyone's stressed the fuck out. And I think, I think there's value in that. Like obviously we want people to grow food and we want this to become a commercial thing, and and and that's a part of this conversation. But when we're tying it within tourism and within development, the commercial piece blends in and it and it really might be more important that the scale fits the place and that it just works. And man, people get impressed by the smallest thing if it's well done. And and you can always make things bigger. That's the biggest piece of advice. Like, man, a tiny garden that's like dialed in is the most beautiful thing in the world. Like, start with that, make that happen. And if you if you then want to commercialize the currents, like go for it. And so I think the places that where I've seen do that, they feel, yeah, perhaps the most successful, the most alive. But I I don't have and I I was trying to think if there's any specifically off top of my head, but there aren't right right now. I think Aluna's a good example. I think their farm is good. It's a big thing, and it it's also been in operation for almost 30 years, 30 years now. And so it's it's had a lot of crazy ups and downs. You could do like a whole Netflix series on that place if you wanted to. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Perhaps a question could be what is the second best time to be in Italy? Because you want to be hanging out and relaxing and recreating in the best time to be in Italy. And what is a crop that could fruit or be processed during the second best time?
SPEAKER_00I think um the edge of the summer, like June, the water's warmed up. You can go in maybe without a wetsuit, and then you're getting into like the summer garden crops. But really, that that's probably the second best time. Probably the best time is going to be end of August, September, October. And so you're still like fig season still happening. Pomegranates will come in while you're there. Olive harvest starts at the end of that, middle of that time. And you're getting the fall veggie garden happening. All the a lot of the citrus are very happy that time of year, and a lot of the stone fruit start coming in as well. While it's still warm, but you're starting to get a little bit of rain and it's cooling down a little bit. Um That like very intense 40 degree like Celsius summer desertification heat that's that the Mediterranean's dealing with for sure. Um, those would be my recommendations. So you'll be coming at a decent time. It'll start getting hot. Up north will be good.
SPEAKER_01Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the Plant the Trees podcast. You're working in the tropics and in Italy and across climates. If people want to work with you, what should they start thinking about and where can they find you? Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_00It's great to connect again. I've been listening to the podcast a bit over the last few years. So whenever you started it, yeah, you can find us at portervenier design.com. That's our website. We're a team of five. We're all co-owners of the business, which is something we're we're really proud of. We've been working toward that for many years. And yeah, if people are interested in exploring this, I you know, I think I would really encourage folks to dive into the world of holistic context creation. You know, for example, in Centropic Farming, I tell people all the time like, if you don't have a goal for this, we should not embark on this. If you do not know what you want out of this, it is it's too much work, it's too much effort for that to make sense. And so the closer in this world that you can get to understanding the purpose and the quality of life you want, the more likely you're going to be successful. And and that just never fails. Um and so folks are want to work with us, we help people develop that process and to see what really comes alive for them when they think about the life they want to live. And we help people kind of create that story of what their life will look like in five and 10 and 20 years. And yeah, you can explore our website, the work we've done. We're really calling in work throughout the global tropics at the moment. We love going to places both when they're starting and being kind of eyes on the ground at the beginning to help set the, to really speak for the ecology of a place before like the architects arrive and they want to put the fancy house on the top of the hill. We want to reforest that hill. And so we love being the first and helping to set the whole design parameters, but we also like coming into existing projects and troubleshooting and understanding what's going on. So if you have a, you know, a hotel or development or a farm somewhere in the tropics that it's not working, like something about it isn't coming together. I think we're really good at helping to diagnose that. Doesn't mean it we're gonna like it's like it doesn't mean it's going to work. It might be structural issues, right? Like these are complex things that we know about farming and and people and money and things. But we would love to come and and and get involved with your project and help you understand how to take it from good to great, from you know, something that maybe is in a struggle into something that's flowing, and and that's just a piece of our work that we uh we just love doing. So yeah, you can reach out on portavineerdesign.com and we'll come visit wherever you are.
SPEAKER_01And you have 18 years of Spanish to be a liaison.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, that one that's disappearing in my Italian, the the Portuguese.
SPEAKER_01Until next time, Scott, thank you so much. Yeah, just a pleasure, Harry. Thank you. A huge thanks to Scott for joining us. Definitely check out Porvenir Designs, they do excellent work. I think what we did today was put some words to the experiences that agroforestry creates. Landscapes produce carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals, but they also yield sensory elation. And you have to be there where your food is grown to truly take that in. All the more reason to plant the trees and make it count. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please don't hesitate to share it with a friend, coworker, family member, LinkedIn contact, or a classmate from high school or college that you've been meaning to reconnect with. I'll see you next time.