How to count coffee...in Spanish (a contar del café en español)

Enough of this getting here and getting to know the place stuff.  Today we worked for real.   Breakfast at 6am, then to the lab to pick up equipment, then off to the coffee fields.  Our job is to take all kinds of measurements of coffee plants, which Sebastian is studying as part of his research.  Basically he is treating different coffee plants on the same farm with different types and amounts of fertilizers, then measuring how well the plants grow and how much coffee they produce.  He is trying to see if farmers can get the same (or better) yields of coffee using less fertilizer or organic fertilizer instead of synthetic ones.  This is an important question because synthetic fertilizers require lots of energy to produce, meaning that they are a major contributor to greenhouse gas production and global warming.  They also damage the soil and pollute surrounding water.  So if farmers could use less fertilizer or organic fertilizer and still produce just as much coffee that would benefit everyone.

So today my field partner was Rigo, a twenty-one year old Tico (native Costa Rican) who has been working with Sebastian on this project for a while, so he really knows how to count coffee!  He speaks very little English and I speak very little Spanish, which made communication challenging.  But that was a good thing because it really forced me to try and learn Spanish.  Mostly I improved my ability to count count en espanol but I learned a few nouns and verbs too, which of course I proceeded to repeat about three hundred times throughout the day.  Who knew how exciting it would be to say "cinta amarilla" instead of yellow tape?

After lunch back at the lab we went to a locally-owned environmentally-friendly coffee processing plant for a tour.  So cool!  As you can see coffee and I are on very friendly terms.