Agricultural Farm Visit

In Guanacaste, we visited an educational farm that is run by an agricultural school. If you go to this school, you can study to be an agricultural engineer, learning to produce food in a more environmentally, socially, and economically friendly way.
I think the most important thing that I learned, as a consumer, is that most sugar takes a big toll on the environment and the people that harvest it. The cheapest sugar you buy has the biggest social and environmental effect, and we learned why during this visit.
In order to harvest sugarcane, the product you see the gentleman (our guide at the farm) holding, many harvesters will burn the field to make the sugarcane easier to harvest. This reduces the amount of effort and also the amount of waste that the harvesters have to worry about. The part that he is holding is the only part of the plant that is used. There are many leaves that are waste. Also, harvesting sugarcane from a freshly burned field can be difficult and dangerous, as sometimes the canes of sugar are still hot, and the harvesters will get covered in the soot from the burnt leaves.
So the people who work here are experimenting with different kinds of sugarcane plants, and also different methods of harvesting it to try to reduce the social and environmental impacts of harvesting sugarcane.

The next thing to note about sugar, is that although white sugar is the sweetest, it takes the most processing, and therefore has the greatest environmental impact. Also, raw sugar, or brown sugar (which both take less processing) will still have the molasses, which gives a nice flavor. :)
We also learned about harvesting mangoes, and while we were in the fields, I felt like I was in an apple orchard. We were allowed to pick mangoes right off the trees and eat them, and man were they delicious!!! :) Apparently there is a process that involves heating them before they are exported to kill fruit flies, and it changes the taste of the fruit.

Mangoes apparently bloom whenever they feel like it, and the managers will apply certain chemicals to try to convince the trees to flower, so they will produce fruit at the time when it will be most economical to harvest them.

Finally, we looked at some rice fields. Rice needs to be floated in order to grow, so it needs a lot of water to produce. In addition, there is a lot of nutritious (fertilized) waste water after growing rice, which is often flowed through lagoons filled with another crop that can be sold for market before the water is released into local waterways. I think this may be where my paper grows. I asked about it, and right now they grow lettuce and another crop, because they can sell it. If they were able to sell it, algae would be a viable option. This is where algae biodiesel fits in. If we get a marked for the biodiesel, they can grow it and make some money off that, too.

I also learned about an alternative to composting, one that involves some kind of fungus or microorganisms to break down food and plant materials. It sounded pretty cool.