Q&A CONVERSATION WITH CORINNE MATTHEWS:
Regenerative Hydroponic Farmer, Educator, Environmentalist, Mother, & Local Food Advocate
M.F. Espinoza (M): Could you share some highlights from your background story and tell us about the journey that led you to start farming?
Corinne Matthews (CM): I was born and raised in New York and my family is from Costa Rica by way of Jamaica. Costa Rica is my passion place; that is that is love, that is relaxation, that is life, that is everything for me, and all of this farming for me is practice to start my real life in Costa Rica.
I knew I was going to homeschool my son in 2020 before the pandemic started. And so, in May of 2020, we were supposed to start our homeschool year in Costa Rica. And then the pandemic happened, and those plans went out the window…
We left in May [of 2022] and stayed for two months; it was like the best two months of my life. My first job was as a middle school teacher. I have a science background and love environmental science, one of the subjects I taught. We talked a lot about different things in the environment. Costa Rica is an amazing place because it has so many different ecosystems and climates that you can be in. We ended up visiting a lot of different places, but my favorite places were the permaculture farms.
It was amazing to see what happens when you don’t try to fight against Mother Nature and work with her. You don’t see that pale brown dust that so many farmers try to grow in. It’s so beautiful and peaceful; you can hear the angels singing when you see these farms! But of course, in the United States, we fight against everything, right? We want to come up with our own way, and nobody else knows anything better.
So, I really fell in love with that model. After seeing what was going on in 2020 in terms of the food supply chain in a country like ours — where everybody should be eating three or four meals a day without issue — [I find it unacceptable that] we have people who are starving.
[Additionally,] some of the more popular preservatives that are used [in mass-produced foods] …they don’t really know what effect they have on human consumption. And I’m like, what? What? Why are we using them if we don’t know what they do to people?
That was really the motivating factor behind me starting to grow food.
