As a part of the study abroad course Global Issues in Sustainability taught jointly by professors Henry Quesada and Tom Hammett, a group of 10 Virginia Tech students visited on March 10, 2010 the company Maderas Cultivadas de Costa Rica located in the north region of the small Central American country. The company has been operating since earlies 1980 when started planting gmelina arborea, a tropical hardwood species. In the beginning the company only focused on planting trees on their own land or also renting land from other farmers.
A few years later the company realized that the installed production capacity of the local sawmills was not a good fit for their long term strategy so the firm invested in developing their own value-added processes. Today the company owns more than 10,000 ha of plantations in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The firm produces plywood, lumber, pallets, and engineering lumber and employs more than 400 people through the whole supply chain.
