Shots of Abarca working land…
SE walking with Abarca

EATON: This is a typical farm in Costa Rica.  About 10 acres of coffee mixed with more than a dozen food crops like corn, beans and bananas.  But when 65-year-old farmer Ademar Serrano Abarca purchased this land a decade ago, it was with the idea of doing things differently. Instead of clearing all the trees… a common practice in tropical agriculture… he set aside more than a quarter of it, letting the forest regenerate.

ABARCA
Not all of us share these same ideas. Other farmers don’t have this, they’ve lost it.  But for me, it’s a gain. Everything you see here is a gain for me.

EATON: Globally, agriculture represents a huge threat to the planet’s remaining natural areas. Costa Rica is trying to preserve what nature it has left. It’s is one of the first countries to compensate farmers like Abarca for leaving part of their land out of production. The Minister of Agriculture, Gloria Abraham Peralta, says policies like this have allowed Costa Rica to go from having one of the fastest rates of deforestation on the planet... to today boasting around 50-percent forest cover.

PERALTA: It’s a commitment to the future by, not the big companies or the big farms, but by the small farmers who know that their future depends on how they care for their farm and their ability to adapt. The future generation’s food supply also depends on that! I think that we as a country can be a good public example at an international level of what can be done.

EATON: Those federal incentives sweeten the pot for small farmers like Abarca.  But the benefits of fostering biodiversity on the farm don’t stop there.  Scientists at the nearby Las Cruces Biological Station have been researching how farmers like Abarca are gaining from the services nature provides.  Gretchen Daily directs Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology.

GRETCHEN:  So the land is producing about 15 food types for people here.  Then on top of that there’s birds providing pest control services. The vast majority of pests on crops are controlled naturally by birds, by wasps, by bats, and other things.

STANDUP: In the past farms were generally considered to be ecological deserts.  Completely barren of the rich biodiversity that exists on nature preserves.  But as scientists study more and more small farms like this one with its mix of trees and coffee and food crops, they’re finding an incredible amount of biodiversity can coexist with food production.

Shots of setting up mist nets and capturing birds in early morning light…

EATON:  It’s early morning, and Daily’s team is stringing out mist nets in Abarca’s coffee fields.  So far they’ve captured more than a hundred different species of birds on these farms and forest fragments.  It’s part of a project to quantify their value in dollars.  Each bird, like this Rufous-Capped Warbler, plays a specific role.  And that role corresponds to an economic benefit to the farmer.

MENDENHALL:  Some of these birds, we have records going back about 14 years.

DAILY: So what we’re trying to find out is how many insects these birds eat. If you have this little bit of tree cover here, how many warblers will you have and how much of a boost will these warblers give to the coffee farmers. This one eats the biggest and most worrying pest on coffee, // we found in its droppings a lot of those little bugs that cause the most economic damage.  //  So it adds a huge boost to the income of farmers.  

EATON: Daily and her team have been tracking the income potential of every insect eater and pollinator on these farms. It’s a 24-hour job.  These bats run the night shift, consuming pests, carrying pollen and scattering seeds until dawn.  

DAILY: Each night they can consume about their body weight worth of insect flesh, mosquitos and other kinds of pests that the farmers don’t want.  


EATON: But it’s nature’s smallest pollinators who have so far brought the biggest gains.  In a study Daily ran on nearby coffee farms she documented how forests next to the farms... and the hundreds of species of native bees that inhabit them... are a boon to coffee production... with the bees leaving the forest and spreading pollen from plant to plant for that one week of the year that the coffee plants bloom.
DAILY:  So you need to have forest integrated into the coffee farm right next to where the farmers are working and the bees then fly out and they’re workers just like the people are... On the one farm where we worked we measured the value of that and it boosts yield by about 20 percent and that lead to an income boost of about 60,000 dollars per year, which really put those farmers into a good economic position.
EATON: And it’s not just small farms that stand to gain from biodiversity.   

Shots of pineapple farm...

EATON: Costa Rica is the largest pineapple producer in the world...  But a vast monocrop like this is extremely vulnerable to costly pest infestations, which are becoming more severe with climate change.  Most farms use huge amounts of pesticides to control the outbreaks.  But this farm is using trees instead, offering a window into how even large scale, industrial agriculture can benefit from working with nature rather than against it.

Jennifer standing in field...

EATON: Jennifer Monge manages the B Jimenez farm in northern Costa Rica. She says keeping half the land in forest provides a natural pest barrier as well as creating a cooler microclimate which protects the pineapples from damaging heat waves and drought.

MONGE: So we’ve been able to increase our yield without touching the forest. We’ve increased our efficiency in managing pests, we’ve increased our overall productivity without increasing our workforce.

EATON:  Yields on this pineapple farm are higher than average and the farm is profitable.  Gretchen Daily says examples like these are proof that the model is scaleable.

DAILY:  The idea in the past is that to have a really high yield you have to blitz it clean and just plant a monoculture of pineapple or sugarcane or coffee or whatever it is. But what we’re finding today is that actually you can sustain really high yield and pretty high biodiversity in these new really smart production systems that are economically attractive as well.

EATON:  With two thirds of our crops worldwide depending on some form of pollination, Daily says more and more farms, large and small, will need to integrate nature.  And if they don’t, the drive to produce more food could wipe out our greatest asset for adapting to the challenges of the future.  

DAILY:  And so the magic in the future to get us out of the crisis we face now with all of these intense pressures on land, with us catapulting to 9 billion people on the planet, diets shifting more towards meat, climate change unfolding in ways that we can’t really predict and other things, the magic is going to come in figuring out how to value nature in our decisions, how to see nature as an asset, a natural asset that can be the engine of human development in the coming century.  

EATON: Perhaps a good place to start, she says, is by seeing nature not as something separate from us, to be preserved and protected, but as an integral part of our daily lives, and ultimately... of our survival as a species.