Monte Romo de Hojancha, Aug. 15 - Against the advice of industry experts, Olivier Barrantes has fields full of trees loaded with ripening cherries at his low-altitude coffee farm in a remote part of Costa Rica.
Located just 800 meters (2,624 feet) above sea level in a region known for its arid climate and searing heat, his 12 hectares of coffee should be an anomaly on the agricultural landscape dominated by cattle ranching and teak farming.
Instead, his is one of almost 200 farms in and around the Hojancha area that continue to churn out washed arabicas sold with the coveted "Costa Rican coffee" tag, despite the region having little to do culturally or geographically with the nation's main growing areas.
Grouped under the CoopePilangosta cooperative, Barrantes and his neighbors produce coffee on well-tended farms, years after the combination of a prolonged coffee price depression and a shift in market preferences to high-altitude beans wiped out most of Central America's low-altitude production.
"I feel that the coffee we produce here is of a good quality," said 53-year-old Barrantes at his farm, where trees full of howler monkeys and giant metallic-blue winged morpho butterflies add to an exotic Pacific Ocean backdrop.
Lowland coffees were once a staple of Central America's coffee exports, but as markets have become more quality conscious the trend has been to phase out farms beneath 1,000 meters above sea level.
Starbucks, which buys the bulk of Costa Rica's coffee, refuses to buy beans grown below the 1,000 meter mark and favors coffee grown above 1,200 meters that can be designated "strictly hard bean" (SHB).
"We've never had a problem or complaints about quality," CoopePilangosta general manager Dimas Rojas said. "Despite not having a maximum altitude, a coffee of ours, compared to a robusta or Brazilian coffee, is of greater quality."
SNUBBED ON QUALITY
Compared to high-altitude coffees, lowland beans tend to be lacking in coveted acidity levels, which add taste, but they can provide more balance in terms of other qualities.
While Starbucks may view the coffee here as short of its standards, many farmers weathered the coffee market crisis thanks to Fair Trade certification, which judges only social and not cup quality criteria.
Throughout Central America, farms still dot the landscape in lands agronomists and government planners say would better serve other uses like cattle, sugar cane and pineapple.
Roberto Inclan, president of El Salvador's Coffee Growers' Association "La Cafetalera", argues strongly in favor of a farm he owns outside the cane-growing center of Sonsonate, just 200 meters above sea level. Lowland coffee is also found on the slopes of the Maderas and Mombacho volcanoes in Nicaragua and along some coastal routes in Guatemala.
Hojancha, in the northwestern Guanacaste province, is in a region cherished for a tradition of Brahman cattle ranching. More recently it has been sucked into a beach development boom as the country embraces "sun and sand" tourism.
Rojas said his cooperative has production levels similar to the national average of roughly 17.6 60-kg bags per hectare, yet it represents a tiny fraction of the country's output.
The cooperative, which has the only processing plant in the area, processed just over 6,100 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2006/07 harvest, less than some plants processed in a week.
Hojancha, located 200 km west of the capital San Jose, is one of the country's least known and least regarded regions and one of the few yet to be awarded a logo in the Costa Rican Coffee Institute's bid to designate different coffee growing regions for specialty coffee consumers.
But despite the snub, farmers in the area say they are committed to coffee farming.
"The great advantage of planting coffee is that one does not have to day labor," said Marcial Carrillo, 47, a neighbor of Barrantes with a 2.5 hectare farm at 540 meters altitude.