River that provides water for Down To Earth farm, Providencia, Dota, Costa Rica
The Coffee Artist: A Personal Memoir I have grown up around coffee. To my family, Down To Earth has been a big part of our lives. By Juliana Zeledon
“We are far from a big company and even farther from a cash cow,” my dad used to say, “but we feel satisfied to see how our principles turn Down to Earth into a company we can be proud of. If you cannot do good while making money, then it is not worth it.” My father died on September 10th, but his legacy lives on in the company he built, the level of integrity he instilled in my mother and me and the principles that guide all of us who are now responsible for producing and delivering the special product he created. Our family has worked in coffee since the late 1880s. My dad’s Uncle, Yanuario, worked with coffee his whole life. My uncle 12
never had children, so he considered my dad as his own. He’d take my dad to his farm beginning when he was eight years old, set him on the hood of his Land Rover, and say, “son, one day all of this will be yours.” When my dad was 17, he started college at the University of Costa Rica and chose the career that was expected of him: agriculture. But he quit less than a year in. He wanted to “find himself,” so he moved to upstate New York to study communications and media arts at the State University of New York in upstate Fredonia, where he specialized in documentary production. However, finding himself eventually led to an “early middle life
