La Nebliselva del Jaguar

The week before this last one, Planting Hope hosted two different brigades based out of Vermont, a busy and somewhat stressful first. One brigade was a service-learning group from Stowe and the other, with which I spent almost all of the week, consisted of 'naturalistas' based out of North Branch Nature Center, near Montpelier. Just a few days after they arrived here in San Ramón, we took a trip north to El Jaguar (ha-wAhr), near Jinotega, where we stayed on a sustainable coffee farm and nature reserve.
Entering El Jaguar, each step is a leap backward in time. Our camion, having gotten lost twice on the way and worrying over the ride south in the dark, lets us out a thirty minute walk from the core of the actual farm, and we trudge through mud and past coffee fields before arriving. Cresting the first hill and entering the reserve is cinematic. Nicaragua is dotted by large areas of humid and fecund nebliselva, or cloud forest, highly elevated enough that they penetrate into cloud and pull water down into the soil. Jinotega is misty at every time but midday, and, compared to Matagalpa, very cold.

El Jaguar is full of rare and beautiful species of birds, both migratory and resident, and grows lush with different tree types. Pumas exist here, but are rarely seen; epiphytes and bromeliads, plants that often grow on and out of other plants, including many orchids, too, and they are ubiquitous. Monkeys used to live here, probably howlers, too. But, during the Contra War, which was fought primarily in the North, guerillas (not gorillas, as our bemused guide assured me) killed them for food, and they have since died out.

The coffee grown in El Jaguar is only partially shade grown, because of the lower temperature and exposure to direct sunlight that accompany being situated inside of a cloud. It therefore does not qualify as 'shade grown' or 'bird-friendly' (though it's located in the middle of a bird reserve). Lack of local organic chicken shit to use as fertilizer also keeps them from being certifiable as 'organic', though they are certainly very 'sustainable', the one certification they qualify for, and their fields, in non-certifiable reality, are both polycultural and bird friendly.
The frustrations felt by the farmers of El Jaguar as they try to garner these labels (with which come increased consumption and the power to charge higher price) highlights the essential laziness of using binary systems of certification to ensure responsible spending. The only effective and all-inclusive way of buying responsibly (both ecologically and socially) is to learn about what is being consumed. The truly informed buyer is able to decide what is sustainable and how to spend his money, and is not misled into believing that the coffee grown under planted shade in Managua is not, for that reason alone, better than coffee grown under a cloud's shade in Jinotega. In the coming years expect the internet to make truly informed consumption more and more easy.
Anyway, a tour of the coffee farm starts in the coffee nursery (cuter than a human nursery) where beans are planted in little rows.

At some point, the plants are moved into little plastic bags where they grow big and strong.

Then, they are moved into the regular coffee fields, where they don't grow coffee beans for a few years. After a few more years, they must be trimmed down, and they sprout beans again in a few years; this (sentence's) process is repeated almost indefinitely, until the plant will no longer work, which has not yet happened to any plants in El Jaguar.

To prevent the growth of weeds the ground is covered with tons of one tiny plant. In some places in El Jaguar, they use a relative of the peanut plant that only works in conjunction with coffee in the cloud forest ecosystem.
More on El Jaguar (birds!) later.