They fight to this day for compensation in American courts. The traditional plantations are sterile. Yes, there are spiders, but there's nothing else. Cruz, Hatt says, operates differently. His plantation doesn't use synthetic chemicals.
Chicken manure is used as fertilizer.
Biofilters clean wastewater from the washing and packing plant. Companion plants are interspersed with the bananas. Cruz may be getting on in years, but his thinking is new. A past director of the Cost Rica's leading banana industry association, Cruz decided several years ago that FHIA bananas were the future. He located a former cattle ranch that his research showed hadn't been sprayed with pesticides or fungicides, or laced with fertilizers, in over a decade.