Counting Coffee in my Sleep (aka Fieldwork- Entry 1)

So, don´t think I´m starting my summer vacation and that I´m sitting on the beach; let me tell you about fieldwork. Today, while you were in class (working hard, of course), I was sweating profusely in the heat of the tropics, counting an endless sea of coffee berries, trying to concentrate as a variety of insects buzzed around my head and occassionally flew up my nose. The rain came early today as well. We have special "Rite in the Rain" paper for recording our data, that has a special coating on it to make water bead up so your notes are preserved. I have been working with Lucía the past two days. She is the only one of our 3 Costa Rican scientists that speaks limited English, so I have learned to say such things as "number of productive nodes" in Spanish. Finally, if I haven´t convinced you that I´m working hard, let me tell you about going to the bathroom in the coffee fields. You know it´s bad when it´s preferable to go outside than in the outhouse. Also, I did a scientific experiment today and determined that banana leaves make better toilet paper than coffee leaves.

So, let´s change the subject....what are the scientists trying to find out? They are trying to identify relationships between farming practices, coffee productivity (how much coffee is produced by a plant), and quality. Some of the objectives are to test these research questions:

• Does less synthetic fertilizer lead to improved soil quality, more production, and/or better quality?


• Does less synthetic herbicide lead to improved soil quality, more production, and/or better quality?
  Do differences among shade trees on the coffee farm (none, one species, multiple tree species) affect soil quality, production, and/or quality?

One thing we measured today was the productivity of a plant. We randomly sampled 10 plants along a transect and measured several characteristics. We counted specific characteristics, like how many branches produced fruit and how much total fruit per branch was present. Each fruit yields 2 beans. I´ll be counting coffee fruit in my sleep tonight. Data collection is important, but can be tedious sometimes.