Postgres issue encoding “UTF8” has no equivalent in encoding “LATIN1”

As guessed, the problem was with the client_encoding on the database.

crd_production=# show client_encoding;
 client_encoding 
-----------------
 LATIN1
(1 row)

To change the client encoding to UTF-8, you need to do this

crd_production=#  SET client_encoding = 'UTF8';
SET

Check again

crd_production=# show client_encoding;
 client_encoding 
-----------------
 UTF8
(1 row)

Things work fine now.