I step off the bus in Rio Claro, Costa Rica, after a seven-hour ride from San Jose. Mirko Rumer greets me with a wide grin. "What is this you wrote me about orange juice rice?" he asks. We walk several kilometers down the main road, Mirko carrying my pack and pushing his bicycle which has a machete ingeniously attached to the bar like a water bottle. "Coconut rice, that’s everyday food," he goes on. "But orange juice, that’s something." We veer off the main road into the jungle on a dirt path, pass other local farmers, walk over a beautiful river, through the tangle of trees to his farm.
This is my second visit to Mirko’s ten-hectare farm. My first visit, in February, I went mostly to be polite. I expected to see rows of crops, an irrigation system, a house, farm equipment, the usual. Instead, he and I walked up the path and he suddenly stopped. "Here it is," he said.
"What?" I asked, peering into the jungle.
"The farm," he said. "Come on."
I followed him down a pretty white rock path into the dense, shady rainforest. He talked as we walked, occasionally using his machete to hack away weeds on the path or covering a tree. "Here’s my precious woods, my teak trees, balsa, beach almond. Here’s a row of fruit trees, mango, orange, star apple, nona. Back here are my bananas, my pejibaye mixed in with the leguminous trees. Here’s my nursery, my secondary nursery."
Slowly the jungle blur resolved into a thriving, pulsing farm.
"Where do you sleep?" I asked.
"There," he pointed with his machete at a tarp and mosquito net.
Now, months later, Mirko has built a lovely bamboo hut where I sleep like a queen on a raised platform under a blue mosquito net. Mornings he disappears into the jungle and returns with breakfast: bananas, coconuts, pineapple, carambolas — fruit that slices into orange stars. One morning he emerges from the thick with an armful of green oranges. "Are these enough?" he asks.
"Quite enough."
I’ve been with Mirko two weeks now and it is clear that for him the highlight of my visit is going to be my Oaxaca orange juice rice recipe.
Mirko’s farm is one of a growing number of permaculture projects. Permaculture, a system created by Bill Molleson of Australia in the seventies, means permanent agriculture. "Normal agriculture cannot be permanent because it degrades the soil," Mirko explains. "And so you have to let fields lie fallow to recover." Normal agriculture — with its heavy use of artificial fertilizer, fuel, farm equipment — spends much more energy than it creates. "Really, you’re living off the oil you use, not the land," he tells me. The idea behind permaculture is to create man-made ecosystems, replicating the cycles of nature so that the system more or less sustains itself and needs less interference to maintain it. "In normal agriculture, you are interfering all the time," Mirko says. "You have to cut the weeds, sow the seeds, collect the fruit, work the earth, cut the trees, let land lie fallow." Molleson’s idea is to create a system which yields more output and needs less input. No chemical fertilizer, no pesticides or herbicides.
"How is that any different than organic farming?" I ask.
"In organic farming you normally have big monocultures — rows of one type of plant — and you still work with machines." In permaculture, the farmer grows the different plants all together in a way that they help each other. "One plant can give the other plant something so you have to give less," Mirko says. For example, here he has planted plantains and pejibaye (a delicious, potato-like fruit). The problem with pejibaye, yummy as they are, is that there are spines on the trunk making them difficult to harvest. So he has planted fast-growing leguminous trees among the plantains and pejibaye so he can climb the leguminous ones and harvest the pejibaye. Also the leguminous tree collects nitrates from the air. The leaves fall and the nitrates go into the earth and feed the pejibaye and plantains. "I planted them all near my hut because they create a shade high off the ground and allow for ventilation," he explains. So the leguminous trees have three functions: an aid for harvesting, a fertilizer, and a shade. This is a perfect example of the main principal of permaculture: every element should support two functions and each function should be maintained by two or more elements. "I’ll show you another example," he says. "Follow me."
I turn to walk. Something crunches under my foot. I look down. "What is that?"
"You just crushed my expensive planting trays, the ones that took me weeks to find."
"Oh my God," I say, almost in tears.
"It’s okay. They don’t work very well."
We walk to his river. He has recently completed a simple and lovely bridge. He explains the bridge has two functions. First, of course, as a bridge, and second as a climbing aid for a plant called grenadillas, delicious tangy fruits that I remember greedily from my last visit. He has built metal arches over the bridge for the grenadilla plant to crawl up this rainy season. Also the plant will give shade to people passing over the bridge. "I imagine the fruit hanging down and you can pick them as you walk by," he says. The more he talks, the more he reveals the layers and layers of function and support — this tree works as a nutrient pump and a living fencepost. This beach almond tree is near the pathway because it gives umbrella-like shade and also its almonds are hard to see in the bush but now they fall on the path. These fruit trees are planted in this wind direction for easier pollenization and also so he can find them. "Trees are easily lost in here," he says. On and on, he talks. "What’s that?" I ask, pointing to a plant.
"Sugar cane," he says and looks suddenly sad.
"What’s wrong?" I ask.
"It’s awful. I couldn’t think of anything to help it or anything else it could do. It’s just sugar cane," he says miserably.
Mirko didn’t begin as a farmer. For years he worked on a Ph.D. in geology in Berlin. Over time he grew disillusioned. "It seemed to be a science only for science, nothing that would solve the more urgent problems of the world like environmental pollution," he says. One day he signed up for a new course. "It had a vague name like Living an Alternative Lifestyle or something — it was a permaculture course." The course changed his life. He quit school and became an apprentice on an organic farm in Germany. Three years later he took an examination and became a biodynamic vegetable gardener. "At a university?" I ask.
"No," he says. "You have to have a paper for everything in Germany."
"A paper?"
"You get a paper that says,‘You are a gardener now.’"
Eventually he decided to come to Costa Rica. "I was interested in trees and tropical fruits," he says. "I grew them at home which is almost impossible in Germany. I wanted to do the real thing, in the real tropics." He wanted to build a small fruit farm. "My vision was very vague before I came."
"What was it like when you first got here?" I ask.
"Oh, the first few weeks," he laughs. "I was very scared. The whole property was like a big jungle."
I look around. It still looks like a big jungle to me.
"I had never seen anything like it — thick underbrush, maybe ten feet high and you couldn’t walk into it without a machete. It went right to the street. I was scared. The first two weeks, I only looked from the street and didn’t even dare to go in!"
But of course he had to begin. So he did. He cut the weeds near the street, made a pathway, planted yucca, corn, bananas. "It was too wet for the corn — it all rotted," he chuckles. "That was the first failure. Then the yucca was eaten up by some animals." He sighs. "Still, it was like conquering a new world."
At first he didn’t talk to the local Tico farmers about his ideas. "I thought it wouldn’t be the right way to behave, to say,‘Hey, look here, I’m doing it all better than you!’" Now, after two years, he tries to approach them bit by bit. They are friendly but not too interested. Once, for example, he noticed his neighbors raking all the dried leaves and dead branches into a pile to burn. "This is like fertilizer," he said to them. "If you take the leaves, build a compost heap, you can use it as potting soil or you can use it for sowing vegetables or for mulch." The neighbors looked at him. "They nodded," Mirko tells me. "They said,‘Maybe you’re right.’ They were impressed." He laughs. "I came back the next day and she had burned the whole heap." He shakes his head. "These habits are so ingrained. I suppose it will take years and years."
But later we visit a local farmer, a gentle Tico who draws boats and soaring birds with bits of charcoal in his spare time. Clearly he respects Mirko as an expert. "What do you think about this tree?" he says, dragging Mirko over. I watch him and Mirko as they walk around the Tico’s farm. The farmer points and talks. Mirko answers after chin-scratching thought. Here’s where it begins, I think.
Permaculture is not only about agriculture but also about social relationships and different ways to exchange food — not only with money. Mirko implements this by trading carambolas, lemons, and grapefruits for coffee or for washing his clothes. He also has a seed exchange with people from all over the world, trading seeds with agriculturists in the Philippines, Australia, Jamaica, Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, and also with aficionados in Costa Rica. This year he’ll build a pond to grow foreign underwater vegetables and plants such as Chinese water chestnuts, lotus flowers, and water hyacinths. "A pond is like a collecting sink — the plants eat up the nutrients in the water so they aren’t washed away but remain in the circle," he explains.
His future plans include implementing social permaculture further. He’d like his farm to be a botanical garden for fruit trees to attract people who are interested in botany and fruits. "It’s not only a polyculture with plants but in its goals as well," he says. He’d like to have a little restaurant eventually, and cabinas for people to come and stay. "It doesn’t stop with picking the fruit and putting it in a box for selling."
Perhaps the restaurant will begin with my orange juice rice recipe. One night, not long before I’ll heft my pack, board the bus, and leave behind this beautiful teeming world, I make it for him.
"Hmm," he says. "Interesting." He puts down his fork.
"You don’t like it."
"I...I...I...thought it would be different," he admits.
"You hate it!" I say histrionically, terribly disappointed. "There’ll be no restaurant. No cabinas!"
"No, no, no," he insists. "Here, watch." He picks up his fork. I have made a bucketful and he eats it all. Every grain, every vegetable. Then, unbelievably, he picks up his plate and licks the last little drops of juice. "Perfect. We’ll serve it every day."
To contact Mirko Rumer, e-mail him at mirkorumer@hotmail.com or snail-mail to: Mirko Rumer, Apdo. 04, 8200 Rio Claro, Costa Rica, Central America.