Eleven years ago, the Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez traveled through the Dominican Republic's western mountain region, the Cordillera Central, to write a story about the area for the Nature Conservancy. Near the town of Jarabacoa, Alvarez and her husband, Bill Eichner, met a group of struggling farmers growing coffee the traditional way—without the use of pesticides and under shade of trees. In doing so, the organic farmers were bucking a trend at larger area plantations of clearing hillside forests to plant more crops, which destroyed the natural habitat of migratory songbirds and damaged the soil with pesticides and erosion. But they needed help.
Alvarez and Eichner offered to make a donation, but the farmers had something else in mind. They asked the couple to buy land they could farm, to help export their coffee to the United States.
Alvarez, author of books including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and the recent Once Upon A Quinceañera, remembers her first reaction was to ask, incredulously, "How?" The couple lived in Vermont, not to mention that neither Alvarez nor Eichner, an ophthalmologist, knew anything about coffee farming.
"I didn't even know there were berries that turned red," says Alvarez, referring to the cherry-like fruit that reddens as it ripens and holds a seed commonly known as a coffee bean. "I had no idea coffee comes from poverty. Like most people in the First World, I just wanted it in my cup in the morning." In the Dominican Republic and other developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Alvarez learned, life is a struggle for many coffee farmers, whose success depends on the fluctuating price of their crop.
For Eichner, the question wasn't one of practicality. It was: "How can we not?" Eichner grew up on a Nebraska farm and witnessed first hand its demise as the land was bought by businesses and consolidated into larger farms in the 1960s. He saw the Dominican farm as a way to give back to the developing country of Alvarez's childhood, and to make a small difference in the lives of the farmers and the Dominican environment.
In 1996, after a bit of persuasion that Alvarez describes as "being dragged kicking and screaming," the couple purchased their first parcel of abandoned farmland some 30 minutes up a windy, country road outside of Jarabacoa. Over the next two years, they bought more land until they had a 260-acre farm, which they named Finca Alta Gracia, after the Dominican Republic's patron saint, Altagracia, or High Grace.
To the untrained eye, the coffee fields at Alta Gracia look like an overgrown jungle. Growing up and down terraced mountainsides, the coffee plants with their small, shiny leaves and spindly branches hold berries in different stages of maturation: some are green, some are pink. When these berries, which contain the precious coffee bean, turn bright red during the harvest period from November to April, they are picked by hand. Overhead is a canopy of leafy Guamas, native pines and lush banana trees. Scratching and pecking at the ground is a large group of free-range chickens.
Everything in this seeming chaos has a purpose and is the result of more than a decade of re-foresting and re-planting, Yosayra Capella Delgado, a farm employee, explained to me on a recent visit. The coffee plants, which can take up to four years to produce their first harvest, are a mix of three varieties of arabica. The trees, with their various heights, provide levels of shade that help the coffee mature slowly, enhancing its flavor. Their leaves also provide nourishing mulch.
