The Finca Project: Striking a balance

Austinite Eliot Logan-Hines, along with three of his friends, co-founded the Finca Project, a nonprofit that operates out of Costa Rica. The organization helps recuperate the rainforest by educating youth and instituting reforestation practices. “What we focus on most,” Explains Eliot, “is striking a balance between human needs and the needs of the ecosystem that supports us.” The Finca Project’s founding and evolution has itself been an organic process.

That Other Paper Tell me about the history of your idea.

Eliot Logan-Hines Well, the way it happened was I was traveling around Costa Rica with my friend Brenden. He had worked with the coffee cooperative there. When he came back to America he was given a free airline ticket because of some complicated stuff that had happened to him on his way home. So when he was ready to go back to Costa Rica he asked me to go with him. I had just finished college and had nothing to do, so I went with him. And while we were traveling around Costa Rica the opportunity to buy a farm super-cheap just fell into our lap.

TOP How does that happen?

Eliot Well, I have a different perspective now because I understand the bigger picture — in terms of the Costa Rican economy. What happened in terms of the big picture was this: In 2001 the coffee market in Costa Rica collapsed. So you had all these farmers that wanted out. They all wanted to sell their farms and no one was buying. We were there in 2005. So by that time there were a lot of farms that had just been abandoned, though some people were still farming coffee.

So Brenden and I were living in this coffee-farming community. And that day we went to help out this farmer, do some work, interview him, talk to him, and just hang out. So Brenden says kind of jokingly that it’s a dream of his to own a farm one day. But the farmer took him totally seriously. So he took us to see this farm that was for sale. At that point for me it was still a joke. I just thought of it as a really cool way to see Costa Rica — traveling around looking at farms. When we’d run into other people we kept up with it — we’d say, “We went and looked at a farm today because this guy thought we wanted to buy one.” And when we’d say that then that person would be like, “I’ll show you a farm.” And before long, it was like everyone was showing us farms.

And eventually we came across this farm that we just fell in love with. It was perfect — it was small, about five acres, it had sweet oranges growing on it — coffee, too. And it was just incredibly cheap, so we knew we had to buy it.

TOP How much was it, if you don’t mind me asking?

Eliot It cost $7,000. So we split it four ways and after lawyers and everything ended up paying about $1,800 a piece.

So we had the farm and, you know, obviously all four of us were into environmental issues — we had studied that in school. And then because Brenden had lived in the community, he was extremely community oriented. So the idea was: We’re all 21, we’ve just bought this farm — how can we create a project that helps the local community, while at the same time — and we were really idealistic at the time — that at the same time helps the entire world and saves the rainforest. So that was the original idea. And it was cool to have all that idealism, but over the past three years our idealism has been tempered by reality and practical concerns. But on the whole we are still idealistic.

TOP So what has the idea evolved into?

Eliot Well, okay — so the original idea was to have a nursery. So we needed trees. That was our first practical concern. We hadn’t thought about what we were going to do when we got the trees. But first, we had to learn all about trees. Where to collect seeds, the cycle of seeds, tropical rain forest ecosystems, which trees grow the best, which trees are most endangered — issues like that. So we learned those things and we built a nursery. Last year we grew about 10,000 trees.

The next level is: We have all these trees, and what are we going to do with them? You know we only have five acres. This is what we come up with: The biggest cause of deforestation is small-scale farming, farmers that need land either for subsistence farming — to grow food for themselves — or for growing some kind of cash crop that they can sell in the global marketplace. The problem then becomes, those people have very little land that could be used to grow trees because even if trees were thought of as an investment for lumber or fruit in the future — the farmers don’t have anything to do in the meantime while the trees grow. So we realized that we had to create economic incentives for people to want to grow these trees.

TOP And what are some of those incentives?

Eliot First you have to understand that there are already economic incentives in place — especially in Costa Rica which is one of the greenest countries in the world. A big fund was given to Costa Rica by the World Bank to fund reforestation. But all of that money goes to really large-scale operations, which are typically owned by multi-national corporations. And in our opinion these are not the people that need the money. The organization in Costa Rica that’s responsible for distributing the fund is FONAFIFO.

And I don’t want to make it sound like these funds are only going to multi-national corporations, but they do typically focus on the really big operations that happen to be involved with big time fruit companies like Del Monte. They way it works is this: The first year they’ll pay $250 per hectare (2.2 acres) that gets reforested. And for the next two or three years, $50 a hectare. So if you’re a large landowner that has 10,000 hectares and you want to reforest 5,000 of those hectares — that’s quite an incentive for you. Now, if you only have two hectares total, and you want to reforest half of your land — that’s not much of an incentive at all.

So we wanted to find a way to create incentives for small-scale farmers to reforest even if it’s just on an acre of land. Because in the grand scheme it does provide a great deal of environmental services for the local community like clean water, erosion control, and also global issues like carbon sequestration. To answer your question: That’s the point we’re at right now — trying to figure out what kind of incentives we can create.

The easiest thing that we’ve already done is subsidize trees. We grow the trees up and sell them very cheap.

TOP What do you mean by “selling a tree,” and how much do you sell a tree for?

Eliot We sell tree seedlings with the roots contained in little plastic bags. We sell them to anybody in the community for about 20 cents a tree. We’re constantly evolving: Last year we gave trees away to farmers that were a part of some organized group. So, for instance, we would give the coffee cooperative a certain number of trees that would then be divided among their members. The idea being that these groups would oversee the care of the trees. But we realized that doesn’t actually work because, first of all, there are many people who feel alienated from those groups yet equally want to plant trees. We also realized that giving trees away for free actually is not an incentive to take care of the trees. Charging a small fee of 20 cents has ensured that people take care of their investment, and, ironically, it has increased demand for the trees. It gives people more of a sense of ownership, and the trees are simply more valuable.

As of right now that’s how the program is running.

TOP Who typically invests in your trees?

Eliot Well, it is typically still people that own moderately large properties — people who have a few acres that they don’t know what to do with. And that is why in the future we want to expand our incentive package so that we can bring poor farmers into the fold. Perhaps a fund that would fund poor farmers in the first couple of years, while their trees grow.

TOP So is there still a coffee connection?

Eliot Yeah, we have an alliance with the coffee cooperative — our office is based in the coffee cooperative’s building. The way we overlap with the coffee cooperative is that — well, going back for a second: The region where we’re located was almost exclusively coffee-growing until 2001 when the coffee market collapsed. So suddenly about 60 percent of coffee farmers have abandoned coffee. A lot of people cut down their coffee and planted pasture grass for cattle.

That shift created a huge rift in the identity of the region — because it had been a coffee culture — and also a change in the economic ecology of the area. With cow pastures you can’t have very many trees, because the shade will kill the grass, whereas coffee can be grown under a canopy of hardwood trees. So we try to work with the coffee farmers — we say, “Hey let’s plant some trees here because you can keep growing your coffee, and eventually get some extra income from the the trees you’ve planted, be it fruit or whatever.” We also help the coffee cooperative sell their coffee and we grow coffee on our farm.

TOP Tell me about the education aspect of your organization.

Eliot So another part of the project is where we work in local schools. We teach the importance of trees and how to take care of trees. We realize that the people that will make decisions about the trees in the future are children right now. So we want to educate them, thereby empowering them, to make good decisions about these trees. And we put a great deal of our focus into the schools — and that’s also the most rewarding aspect of the program. Generally our experiences in the schools are really awesome. And you can see that you are affecting individuals — making a difference.

And on top of that, you know, because the coffee market crashed — it’s a rural community that’s following very similar patterns to what’s happened in America after WWII which is that small farming towns are disappearing because the larger economy no longer supports that. So what we’re trying to do with the kids is educate them and get them to stay there, use their creativity and entrepreneurship to create a local economy that can support the people that live there. Because the population is growing in those rural communities and isn’t likely to stop. You have this rapid population growth but not an equally rapid economic growth. And we think that education is definitely the best tool to use to actually solve that problem.