The Cooperative produces organic coffee. First, the beans are sifted to separate them for size. Then the beans are picked over by hand to remove all broken beans and anything else that might not be coffee. Then they are bagged and shipped out to Washington state to be roasted.		Coffee

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Making Honey		The Cooperative makes honey for sale. They also serve it during meals. Getting the stuff into the field requires a great deal of brawn as you can see from the photograph on the right. And you must have a head for this sort of work.

Rice

There is a great deal of commerce in rice on the island. The standard bag of rice weighs in at 100 pounds. Just about every day on La Fiera you'll see a conductor heave a bag over his shoulder and walk it into the rickety bus. Then he goes back for another. It's really special when he has to put the bags of rice on top of the bus. At least for us watchers, anyway. At the hacienda there's a huller. It's just below where we sleep. Whenever they run out of rice a couple of really strong guys fire up the diesel belching machine and run a bag or two of rice through it. Needless to say, you don't sleep much while all this is going on. Or breathe, either, for that matter. You see rice laying out to dry in just about every yard in town, sometimes on a concrete drying surface that may be used for coffee beans as well, or sometimes the rice is strewn over a couple of pieces of burlap.