Pineapples are a big business here in Costa Rica. The big companies use chemicals, to keep pests down, that are poisoning the water. In some cases, they are made to replace a towns water supply with another source but few are made to clean up the existing mess. There are rows and fields and entire tracks of land all dedicated to pineapples here. They run for as far as the eye can see. We plant our pineapples from babies that grow directly from a mother plant that we were told was heirloom. A pineapple takes about 9 months to mature and produce more babies.