The political awakening of organic coffee grower Linda Moyher \u201967 took place in the arms and ammunitions industry during the Vietnam War. The war, however, had nothing to do with the political stirrings Moyher felt in her first post-graduation job, at the Remington Arms Co., in her hometown of Stratford, Conn.<\/p>\n
A Spanish major, Moyher was the firm\u2019s first female export sales trainee, and the job, she thought, would put her in contact with Remington\u2019s international clientele. But then she noticed a few things. \u201cI was the only trainee who had to take a typing test,\u201d she recalls. \u201cAnd I was excluded from some training sessions, like budget forecasting.\u201d<\/p>\n
A feminist perspective was born. \u201cI don\u2019t think it ever occurred to them that I would want to move up in the company,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I had ambitions.\u201d So she quit and joined the Navy. \u201cI figured the U.S. government wouldn\u2019t discriminate against its own citizens. Not exactly the truth, but at least I had a fighting chance for a career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Moyher and her husband, Ernie Carman, both former Navy officers, own and run Finca Cristina, a 30-acre coffee farm in Costa Rica. The organic operation sits on the south slope of Iraz\u00fa Volcano, in the central highlands (about 4,500 feet) of Cartago province.<\/p>\n
Stationed along the Panama Canal in the 1970s, the couple bought Finca Cristina in 1977 and left the Navy, Moyher eschewing a promotion. At the time, the couple had a boy and a girl, and a second son would arrive in 1982. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t sound like a feminist talking,\u201d she says of the decision to settle on a Costa Rican farm, \u201cbut my mothering instincts said we would be better off living in one place rather than different Navy bases.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shade-grown and sun-dried, Finca Cristina\u2019s Arabica coffee beans enjoy TLC during cultivation and production. Weeds are cut with machetes; tilling would damage coffee roots in the topsoil. \u201cA conventional farm wouldn\u2019t have as much organic matter in the soil, so the roots would go down,\u201d Moyher explains.<\/p>\n
Paid nearly twice the government rate, local workers hand-pick the coffee, cherry by cherry, rather than stripping them off the branch. Milling separates the beans from the fruit, and California red worms help compost the leftover pulp. The farm has never used chemical herbicides and pesticides, but Moyer defines \u201corganic\u201d as what is<\/em> done. \u201cYou replant trees. You restore habitats. Our tiny farm has 270 bird species. Birds you see in New England winter on our farm.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to be environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable,\u201d Moyher says. But with the price of coffee a third of what it was in the 1980s, economic sustainability \u201cis the hardest.\u201d Bypassing middlemen, Finca Cristina now mills its own coffee, exporting it directly to U.S. roasters (in 1997, the mill won an environmental award from the Ministry of Energy and Environment). And recently, the farm began roasting coffee for direct mail-order retail sale under the name Caf\u00e9 Cristina.<\/p>\n Ironically, coffee roasting \u2014 the part of the business most removed from farming \u2014 is most profitable. But Moyher won\u2019t abandon their organic mission. Making money is \u201cnot our success story,\u201d she points out. \u201cOur environment here on the farm, our children, and the way we treat the land and the people \u2014 that\u2019s our success story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The political awakening of organic coffee grower Linda Moyher \u201967 took place…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":8087,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-2237","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10756,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2237\/revisions\/10756"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}