Tatiana Vargas Navarro, a Costa Rican producer, took over the reins of the family coffee farm and now exports her coffee to Japan.
San Jose, March 3 2025 (IICA) – Tatiana Vargas Navarro—a Costa Rican farmer who returned to her parents’ plantation after studying Agronomy at the University of Costa Rica and, along with her mother, placed the farm on a path for future growth and exportation—has been named a Leader of Rurality of the Americas by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
Tatiana will receive the Soul of Rurality award, which is part of an initiative by the organization of the Inter-American System specializing in agricultural and rural development to shine the spotlight on men and women who are leaving their mark and making a difference in the rural Americas. They play a key role in ensuring food and nutritional security and promoting environmental conservation.
“My family have always been coffee farmers”, says Tatiana, explaining the first connection that ties her to her birthplace and to the bean that provides a livelihood for many Latin American families.
There is also another quite unique reason. Her father first started his plantation, “just when I was born”, Tatiana recalls. “The fact that these plants are the same age as me and that we grew up together is quite significant for me”. “You see them as your sisters”? “Kind of, but they are more like daughters to me now”.
Although she is now the successful owner of Legados Café Artesenal, Tatiana confesses that, “in reality, my father wanted me to do something else”. She dreamed of being an agronomist since she was a child, and the natural step was to enroll at the University of Costa Rica. Years later she graduated and first worked in the ornamental crops sector.
However, after she had worked for a private company for five years, her father got ill and later died in 2016. She admitted that “I found myself at a crossroads”, until I took the decision to return to the farm in Cartago “to turn the plantation around and to build on the foundation that my parents had worked so hard to create”.
Her friends and coworkers asked her: “But Tatiana, how can you resign? How can you leave to grow coffee?” She had made up her mind. “At that moment I felt it was more important to come back and work in the venture that my parents had built for me. My heart was here; it was calling to me”.
Along with her mother, Tatiana threw herself into the work on the farm: “We did all the labor on the plantation; we did the reaping”, she said. “I admire my mother tremendously, because she is more than 70 years old, and she still takes pleasure in doing the chores on the farm”.
Despite initial challenges, mother and daughter increased the productivity of their farm and in 2018 managed to establish their own micro-mill.
Specialty coffee produced by women
The first few years were challenging, but mother and daughter managed to increase productivity on the farm and achieved another goal in 2018, when they installed their own micro-mill, a place that Tatiana describes as “tiny”, where “we process our own coffee and then export it”.
With a foot firmly in the growing specialty coffee market, the farm exports the green coffee, which is then roasted and ground by importers in other countries, whether to sell under their own brand or to distribute to coffee shops. Currently, twenty percent of Legado’s production is concentrated in this sector. The remainder is marketed in the traditional way, selling the beans to local collection centers, which then distribute them to industrial coffee processors for subsequent exportation.
“We dry our coffee in a greenhouse, we dry it in the sun. We do it ourselves, with our own hands. That is why we can say that it is artisanal coffee, produced by women”, Tatiana tells us proudly, although being a “female” also creates problems for her, due to old customs that persist.
“When you are a woman” in the business of agriculture “you lose credibility”, explains the young Costa Rican farmer. When she began to renovate the plantation with her mother, “many people said we probably wouldn’t succeed, because as women, we didn’t know anything about coffee and would end up having to sell the farm”.
She admits that sometimes “in the process of hiring coffee pickers or other laborers on the farm, they would often look at me and ask: “Where is your father or your husband”? You meet resistance and sometimes it’s difficult to find workers, because people don’t want to work for a woman”.
Tatiana points out that, “Now, there are much more women, for example in the quality control sector, both in micro-mills as well as in large-scale processing plants, or in marketing. But in the field, on the farms, there are only a few women “that can take on the hands-on labor in the field”.
For her though, there is no turning back. “Many people in my area studied and work outside the community. They are children of farmers, of coffee growers, but they preferred to migrate. And it makes sense to a certain extent, “because there are daunting obstacles and challenges in the countryside”, she notes. You need to “put in twice the effort to be an entrepreneur”, says the farmer. Tackling the ins and outs of the market “is complicated. It’s much easier to work for someone else, knowing that you can collect a salary every two weeks”.
“We must also depend on the climate, which is something we cannot control. We can develop a strategy to adapt to variations in climate, but we can’t be prepared for everything”, admits Tatiana, who nonetheless points out the role that young people can play in the countryside.
Tatiana points out that many more women are already seen in the quality control sector, both in micro-mills and in large-scale mills, as well as in the marketing area.
“We can make an immense contribution to innovation”, she insists, and lists examples, such as developing other varieties of coffee that are more disease-resistant and productive and emphasizing the need to convert plantations into veritable ecosystems, where other species can contribute, for example by providing shade and nutrients.
“For me, coffee is magical”, says Tatiana, as she begins to say goodbye, “because it reminds me of the happy days of my childhood, of my father, who is no longer here. Each time I return to the farm, the movement of the trees gives me the sense that he is embracing me. When the wind whistles, I feel his presence. I touch the leaves and he’s here with my mother and me… It is almost like a whisper”.
Since there is no room for egotism on this farm, Tatiana says that one of her objectives is to “show others how coffee awakens these feelings. It is not simply coffee; it is about feelings, memories, values, lessons, something immense that can be shared by way of a fragrance”.
More information:
Institutional Communication Division.
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int
