Last month, four of us visited a coffee farm in Nicaragua – a first-time visit to origin for three of us.

Upon arrival in Managua, we were chauffeured to Selva Negra by the owner of the farm, Mausi Kuhl. Situated on the border of Matagalpa and Jinotega, Selva Negra is about a three-hour trek east of the capital airport. On the way, Mausi and her son-in-law, Steve, gave us a quick history of the farm and tried to prepare us for what we would encounter in the next couple of days. In the late 19th century, Nicaragua actively recruited Western European immigrants. Mausi’s and Eddy’s (her husband) ancestors were among this first generation to arrive, both from Germany (Selva Negra is Spanish for Black Forest, their ancestral home). They married local women and started farming coffee, gaining patents for some of their coffee-processing technology. The estate was a fairly conventional farm until the 1980’s when Eddy and Mausi decided to evacuate the farm during the Sandinista-led civil war. Once they returned at the end of the decade, they reclaimed their land and decided to become as self-sustaining as they could, relying on the Sandinista-controlled public utilities as little as possible.

Since that decision, Selva Negra has become a true community. About 250 people live on Selva Negra year-round, and a few years ago, they started promoting themselves as an eco-tourism site. Simple hotel accommodations and cabins are available for rent and a full-service restaurant supplies lodgers as well as local families from Matagalpa who drive up the mountain for a special dinner on weekends. Arriving long after nightfall, we would have to wait until the next morning to begin to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding rainforest and farmland and to understand how Selva Negra has made itself a model in the coffee industry.

Daybreak comes early in Nicaragua. Full sunlight and chatty geese arrive by 6am. Once we were convened in the restaurant, we feasted on eggs collected on the property and sausage made on-site from pigs raised on the farm. Our tour started with the cluster of housing for the year-round workers. Families live in cabins and temporary workers (who come in for about six weeks during the height of the picking season) stay in large dorms with private, fully-enclosed bunks. A kitchen prepares all meals for the workers (cooking with a combination of methane harvested from wastewater and coffee parchment for fuel) and a nurse’s office and school are located in the center. A small cheese factory is located behind the kitchen, on the way to the horse stalls and cattle pastures. Off to the side are the greenhouses and water-treatment areas. Slightly up the hill, sits the de-pulping station right beside Eddy and Mausi’s house. Further down the hill are the composting facilities and the hydro-electric plant.

Coffee is grown all over the farm. Since this is a Rain Forest Alliance-certified property, coffee trees are grown in the shade of grapefruit, papaya, cacao, and a variety of other indigenous plants. We visited during the end of the picking season. Coffee cherries continually ripen throughout the season, and must be picked by hand only when they are bright red and at their ripest, making for a very labor-intensive product. Most of the trees had been picked 5 times by the time we were sent out to harvest and collect our own coffee cherries. On this final pick, all cherries had to be removed, no matter how ripe or unripe, to keep bugs from infesting the trees during the off-season. We spent about 45 minutes picking cherries, during which time, the seven members of our party harvested enough to slightly over-fill one basket. The foreman who showed us how to pick, can usually fill 12 of those baskets in one day.

At the end of each picking day, the entire yield is trucked up to the de-pulper. There the outmost layer of the cherry is removed and the coffee is allowed to rest in pools of water. This resting period starts the natural fermentation process by which the remainder of the mucalegen layer is removed. Once this pulp is removed, the beans are sorted and laid out on racks to begin the drying process.  Also, at this point, the most perfect coffee beans are separated out to become seedlings and be planted on the farm the next season.

The next part of the drying process is accomplished at the beneficio, or dry mill. Recently, Selva Negra was able to open its own beneficio about half an hour away from the farm, down the mountain where it is hotter and drier. Once the beans are transported there, they are spread out on large drying patios and turned several times a day by manual raking, a task we also got to try our hands at. Sufficiently dry after a couple of days, the beans are then sent through a couple of machines that remove the parchment (collected to be sent back to the farm as cooking fuel) and start to separate out the broken bits and mis-shapen beans (which will go into the lower grades of coffee). They then pass down a conveyor and are sorted by hand- each bag sorted twice. Finally, at this point, they are loaded into the hand-stenciled 65kg bags and sewn shut, stacked in the warehouse out of direct sunlight until they are loaded onto a ship for transport. All of these steps, I had read about and knew, but to actually take part in them helped me to better understand them.

Since the Kuhls returned to Nicaragua and made the decision to make the farm as self-sustaining as possible, they have been open to trying new ideas, constantly searching for ways to become more efficient or to re-purpose materials. Using the coffee parchment as cooking fuel is just one of the more striking applications. There is an active laboratory on-site, where they experiment with natural fertilizer and bug-deterrent recipes. All food waste, plant waste, and manure goes to a composting facility at the bottom of the farm, where millions of worms convert the material back into healthy humus to be used in the greenhouses. They have recently started a mushroom cultivating project, growing the fungi from inoculated bags of used coffee grinds. They are early into a cacao-growing project, having contracted a chocolate manufacturer to help them grow the trees, harvest and dry the pods, and convert the cacao to finished chocolate. Everything that can be is recycled here. Used metal goes to the metal shop to be re-configured into useful tools and plastic water bottles are cut open and made into traps for the coffee-damaging broca insect.

Our couple of days on the farm passed quickly but they left great impressions. I’m excited to go back and visit in another year or two to see what else they have accomplished.