Green travel guide

Organic and Regenerative Farms in Costa Rica: Meet the Farmers and Visit

Costa Rica has working organic, agroforestry and permaculture farms you can visit, from family cacao in Mastatal to the regenerative farm at Finca Luna Nueva near La Fortuna and Finca Tierra on the Caribbean coast. Words like organic and regenerative mean different things: in Costa Rica, organic is a certified status under Law 8591, while regenerative and permaculture describe methods, so ask each farm what it actually does.

By Pura-Verde.com Editors · Published October 30, 2026 · Last checked October 30, 2026

Best for

Food lovers, gardeners and anyone curious how tropical farms can rebuild soil and habitat

Where

Mastatal in Puriscal, San Isidro de Peñas Blancas near La Fortuna, Cocles near Puerto Viejo, the south shore of Lake Arenal

Good to know

Under Law 8591 (2007), organic sales in Costa Rica rely on third-party or participatory certification overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG)

Book ahead

Most farm tours and courses run by reservation, and working farms may limit visits during harvest

Ask before you go

Who leads the tour, what's grown on site, and whether 'organic' means certified or self-described

Some of Costa Rica's most interesting environmental projects are places where you can taste the results: a family making chocolate from its own trees, a farm testing forest-like fields, teachers who turned old cattle pasture into a classroom. Their biggest asset isn't a badge. It's decades of trial and error.

In Costa Rica, organic, permaculture, agroforestry, biodynamic and regenerative often get used together, sometimes loosely. A farm can care deeply for its soil and wildlife without an organic certificate. A certified organic farm can still be a monoculture. A food forest can be productive without replacing everything a native rainforest does. The best way to understand these words is to meet the people who use them, walk a real field and ask what they changed when the first attempt failed.

What organic, regenerative and permaculture mean in Costa Rica

• Organic is a legal status here. Costa Rica's organic agriculture law, Law 8591 of 2007, puts the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG) in charge. Products sold abroad need third-party certification, while small producers selling at home can use a participatory system built on direct relationships between farmers and buyers. Labeled organic products should name their certifier.
• Agroforestry means growing trees and shrubs together with crops or livestock, like cacao under shade trees.
• Permaculture is a design approach that connects water, soil, plants, buildings and people so each part supports the others.
• Regenerative agriculture is a broad set of practices aimed at rebuilding soil, water and biodiversity. There's no single Costa Rican certification for it.
• Syntropic agroforestry plants crops in layers and sequences that imitate natural forest succession.

None of these guarantees success. A farm might be great at restoring habitat and weak on wastewater. Another might reduce erosion while still buying in most of its food. Costa Rica's volcanic soils are rich, but heat and heavy rain also speed up erosion, nutrient loss, pests and weeds. Soil tests, observation and patient maintenance matter as much as enthusiasm.

La Iguana Chocolate: a Mastatal family that taught itself chocolate

Mastatal is a small farming village in Puriscal, at the southern edge of La Cangreja National Park. At La Iguana Chocolate, the family started out in 1985 growing cacao and selling fermented, dried beans through a small cooperative. Three generations helped plant the orchards. In 2005 they launched their own chocolate, learning by trial and error with homemade machines.

Rancho Mastatal's course page describes Jorge Salazar as a practicing agroforester and the founder and owner of La Iguana Chocolate. It credits his wife, Vicky Chandler, and the Salazar family with perfecting the recipes. The farm page describes a cacao orchard kept up entirely by hand, from pruning and mulching to harvest, inside a wider agroforestry system with fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices and hundreds of vanilla plants. Their goal is to grow most of their chocolate's flavorings on site.

The farm calls its orchard organic but doesn't name a certifier, so treat that as the family's own description. It does mention a 4-star rating in Costa Rica's Blue Flag program.

La Iguana hosted volunteers for about 10 years but no longer takes them. It now welcomes students, groups and course participants. The chocolate tour runs by reservation only, with a walk through the agroforestry system, tastings at each stage, and time making chocolate yourself. Message the farm to check availability before you drive out.

Rancho Mastatal: where the buildings are part of the farm

In the same village, Rancho Mastatal has been a sustainability education center, working farm and ecolodge since 2001. It teaches permaculture design (since 2005), natural building, agroforestry, farm-to-table cooking and fermentation, renewable energy and wilderness medicine, with apprenticeships and group programs. Upcoming listings include a Permaculture Design Course in December 2026 and natural building workshops in early 2027.

Its instructor bios introduce two founding members. Robin Nunes has lived on site since 2001 and works as bookkeeper, earth builder and kitchen lead, with almost 30 years in natural building. Tim O'Hara, her partner, has co-directed the ranch and teaches woodworking, earth building, permaculture, timber framing and wilderness first response.

The permaculture page explains how the land changed. The ranch began as an abandoned farm. Soon after, most of it became a private wildlife refuge in cooperation with the environment ministry (MINAE), and more than 200 acres of once-deforested land is now secondary forest. A small share is used for buildings, food forests and orchards growing cacao, vanilla, black pepper, rambutan and bamboo. The ranch says more than 90% of its calories come from within about 15 miles, and it still buys plenty from neighboring farmers.

Course instructors include Amanda Calvo, who leads LaHerbaria, founded the Costa Rica Medicinal Plants Network and is certified as an analog forestry instructor and designer, according to her course bio. Jorge Salazar teaches there too.

The lesson isn't that every farm should copy Rancho Mastatal. It's that 25 years of testing how housing, food, materials and teaching fit together in one wet, hilly place teaches you the limits of any single design idea.

Finca Luna Nueva: ginger, Walter and a farm that changed its mind

Finca Luna Nueva sits in San Isidro de Peñas Blancas on the Caribbean slope, about 25 minutes from La Fortuna, next to the Children's Eternal Rainforest. The Finca Luna Nueva Story calls Steven Farrell the founder. He'd farmed organically since 1984 and was shipping ginger to a U.S. herbal company by 1992. When that company needed more, he bought the roughly 30-hectare farm in 1994, on land that local farmer Walter Arias showed him. Walter joined the workforce soon after and, according to a 2025 farm journal post, is still one of its farmers. Turmeric followed in 1999.

Tom Newmark helped Steven imagine and build the farm and lodge. Tom's wife Terry, an artist, guided the lodge's look, and Steven's daughter Kimberly now runs operations.

The interesting part is that the farm changed course. It adopted biodynamic methods early on. Around 2010, after learning about regenerative agriculture, the team found its biodynamic fields were losing soil carbon compared with areas left alone. The farm moved toward syntropic agroforestry. Its regenerative tourism page describes a 1-hectare syntropic cacao plot plus areas built around coffee, breadnut, and rice and beans, alongside spices, a dairy herd and a native stingless bee project. The farm tour shows a cacao monoculture kept for comparison and a plot left to regrow untouched.

These are the farm's own accounts, useful as a field guide but not a substitute for independent soil or carbon measurement. The lodge displays Costa Rica's sustainable tourism certification logo; check the ICT listings for its current level.

Finca Tierra: from worn-out pasture to a Caribbean classroom

Near Cocles Beach, outside Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Finca Tierra started in 2008 on what its founders call an exhausted cattle pasture. Today it's a 9-acre, off-grid permaculture education center with food forests, gardens, bamboo buildings, solar power and rainwater systems.

Co-founder Ana Gaspar is a Costa Rican lawyer, environmental activist and permaculture designer who founded the Plan Bioregional de Talamanca. Her work centers on food sovereignty, Indigenous worldviews and environmental law. Co-founder Ian Macaulay is a permaculture designer, consultant and visual artist who specializes in tropical agroforestry, food systems and mapping, and also co-founded SEED Ecovilla.

Finca Tierra offers a 15-day residential Permaculture Design Course, an online tropical permaculture course in Spanish and a week-long plant, harvest and cook retreat. It's not a drop-in tour stop. Talamanca's rain, soils and history differ sharply from Guanacaste's dry forest or the Arenal foothills, and a good permaculture education teaches you to read those conditions before proposing solutions.

Rancho Margot: a self-powered ranch on Lake Arenal

On the south shore of Lake Arenal, near El Castillo, Rancho Margot was started in 2004 by Juan Sostheim, who grew up in rural Chile. The ranch describes him as a former fast-food executive turned environmentalist. The ranch combines lodging, farming and environmental education, and makes most of its own power from water, with a diesel generator as backup. CNN's The Next List featured Sostheim in an episode narrated by Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

The challenge here is different from Mastatal's: running a guest destination while managing energy, wastewater, compost and farm work as one system. The ranch calls its systems closed-loop. As with any farm, ask how it measures that.

Farms that grow food and reconnect forest

In southern Costa Rica, Rare's August 2026 reporting follows a farmer named Vivian in Coto Brus, who let forest regrow on family land and keeps planting native fruit trees, and Uriel, a young rancher who's seen fewer landslides where land was reforested. They're part of a corridor effort by Rare and Osa Conservation, where tropical forests program manager Rodrigo De Sousa works with farmers on restoration.

That widens what regenerative means. A farm can feed wildlife, link forest patches and protect the stream that supplies the next town, but only if the family can afford those choices. Read more in our guide to reforestation in Costa Rica.

How to choose a real farm visit

Start with what you want to learn:

• Chocolate and family agroforestry: La Iguana Chocolate in Mastatal.
• A long immersion in permaculture or natural building: Rancho Mastatal or Finca Tierra.
• A farm lodge with tours and farm-to-table meals: Finca Luna Nueva near La Fortuna.
• An off-grid ranch with lodging: Rancho Margot on Lake Arenal.

Questions worth asking:

1. Does a farmer or trained guide lead the visit?
2. What does the tour actually cover, and is it hands-on or just a walk?
3. Is the food you're served grown on site, bought locally or shipped in?
4. Is "organic" certified, and by whom, or is it the farm's own description?
5. What failed, and what did they change?

Working farms have busy seasons and may close fields during harvest, repairs or planting. For a longer stay or apprenticeship, get clear answers on housing, workload, supervision, insurance and how much stays with local staff. Our ethical volunteering guide has a fuller checklist.

Where to taste the harvest

Farm visits pair well with eating locally. Our guides to farm-to-table restaurants and organic farmers markets point to places that buy from small producers. You can also find farms and food spots on the Pura-Verde map.

In the news, meet Olga Vargas, a farmer from southern Costa Rica honored among FAO's 100 Women Heroes, and read about a bee-genetics pilot at Reserva Conchal that supports local pollinators. Dry years hit farms hard, too: in September 2026, 74 communities were rationing water.

Frequently asked questions

Can you visit organic farms in Costa Rica?

Yes. La Iguana Chocolate in Mastatal runs reservation-only chocolate tours, Finca Luna Nueva near La Fortuna offers farm tours, and Rancho Mastatal and Finca Tierra host courses and stays. Book ahead, since most are working farms.

Is "organic" regulated in Costa Rica?

Yes. Law 8591 (2007) puts the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG) in charge of organic production. Exports need third-party certification, and domestic sales can use participatory certification. Words like regenerative or permaculture aren't certifications.

Where can I take a permaculture design course in Costa Rica?

Rancho Mastatal in Puriscal has taught Permaculture Design Courses since 2005, with a December 2026 session listed. Finca Tierra near Puerto Viejo runs a 15-day residential course. Check each center's calendar for current dates.

What is regenerative agriculture?

It's a set of farming practices meant to rebuild soil, water and biodiversity, like cover crops, agroforestry and layered planting. It isn't one standard, so ask a farm which practices it uses and what it measures.

Can I volunteer on a farm in Costa Rica?

Some farms take volunteers or apprentices, but not all. La Iguana Chocolate stopped taking volunteers after about 10 years. Look for clear supervision, defined hours, safe housing and fair treatment of local staff.

Sources

1. La Iguana Chocolate: About
2. La Iguana Chocolate: Farm
3. La Iguana Chocolate: Tour
4. Rancho Mastatal: home
5. Rancho Mastatal: Permaculture
6. Rancho Mastatal: Permaculture Design Course (Fall 2026)
7. Rancho Mastatal: Permaculture Design Course (Spring 2027)
8. Rancho Mastatal: Natural Building and Plasters Intensive
9. Finca Luna Nueva: home
10. Finca Luna Nueva: The Finca Luna Nueva Story
11. Finca Luna Nueva (Ariel Potoy, March 31, 2025): Explore the future of farming at Finca Luna Nueva
12. Finca Luna Nueva: What regenerative tourism really means
13. Finca Tierra: Inicio
14. Rancho Margot: Our story
15. Rare (August 3, 2026): The future of Costa Rica's wildlife corridors runs through its farms
16. Bufete de Costa Rica: Ley 8591 de desarrollo, promoción y fomento de la actividad agropecuaria orgánica

We checked these pages when we last updated this guide. We didn't interview the people named; their roles and words come from the sources above.