Farm to Table

Though the humid heat can be stifling, I loved summer in the South because in my family the season meant a garden full of crunchy green beans, juicy tomatoes, fresh herbs and trips to local farmers’ markets to pick up the fruits and veggies we didn't grow ourselves. 

Lucky for me, living in Bocas del Toro, Panama, has been like living in a perpetual summer filled with local agricultural products, many of them new to me! Though I often offer to buy products from my neighbors, it’s also culturally common for me to be gifted any of the local foods in exchange for helping out on the farm or simply just stopping by to say hello.  As an extra bonus for me- since I’m getting the produce in my site, I don’t have to hike it in like everything else I eat!

So, what’s available here?

All year round we have cacao coconuts, culantro, bananas, plantains, papaya, a scattering of peppers and rice, and several varieties of root vegetables.  Though yucca, dachin, name, and ñampi are  prepared similar to potatoes, they have a richer taste (and come in shades ranging from white to purple!)

Seasonally we also have pineapple, pixvae, orange, lemon, guava pods, cashew fruits, soursop, and coffee. 

In addition to the crops, most families have chickens for meat and eggs.  Families with access to a little more resources may also have turkeys and/or pigs, and the most well off families have a few cattle.  Other than chicken, meat is considered a special occasion thing.  Add in the fact that we don’t have refrigerators to preserve meat, and that means that meat days are big feast days.  Obviously, I’m a fan.  

Cacao!  My favorite local product, obviously

A local pod-like fruit with a delicious fruit

A meal packed to-go: fried pork pieces with boiled green bananas

Local products for sale and exhibit at a local agricultural fair

To the Finca

One of the first agriculture terms I learned after arriving in Panama was finca.  A finca is the "small" plot of land sustenance or small-time, self employed cash-crop farmers tend.  

Most fincas are managed 100% by the family that owns them, though day laborers can be acquired for $4-$10/day. Panamanian farmers grow a variety of crops in their finca, depending on what region they're located in.  While just about every finca has at least a few Panamanian staple crops (bananas, plantains, root vegetables, corn, rice, and beans), each region seems to have it's own specialty based on soils, elevation, and agricultural history.

Citrus, robusta coffee, and coconuts grow in most of the central and eastern provinces. 

The Chiriquí highlands are famous for delicious vegetables and arabica coffee, and Bocas del Toro is known for it's cacao (yummmm).  

Though it depends on the land and individual producer, most rural farms have fairly low levels of production since they rely 100% on human laborer without the support of tractors or other modern agricultural machines and tools.

While they may be small by American farm standards, it takes a lot of work to manage a finca!  In my community, men do manual labor such as pruning, weeding, and pest management from early in the morning until 1 or 2 in the afternoon.  Women and children are sent to the finca once or twice a week to gather food for the family- bananas, plantains, and native root vegetables like ñame, ñampi, and dachin.  If it's a good week, there might even be fresh coffee or cacao!  

Some communities love to work in agricultural groups called juntas.  Each member farmer would take turns hosting a junta, a communal work day, in which the other member farmers would come and help out on the farm for free in exchange for lunch.  They rotate farms with each junta so that each member benefits and gets to enjoy some company in their daily (or weekly) labors.  

While typical juntas aren't common in my town, I did learn about a new type of women's junta when I was invited to my neighbors farm a few weeks ago!

Granted, I don't think I'll ever crave the local staple of boiled green bananas, but I have developed quite a taste for some of the other foods grown locally.  Dachin- a deliciously purple potato like vegetable is my favorite, but it's not sold in stores.  Since I can't resist my childlike cravings for purple mashed "potatoes," I asked one of my favorite neighbors, Milsa, if she had any extra dachin that I could buy.  She told me that she didn't, but invited me to her finca the next week.  Assuming that I was just going to help carry vegetables the 45 minute hike down the mountain, you can imagine my happy surprise when she gifted me a whole bag of bananas, plantains, and fresh jungle flowers!  

Apparently this is a pretty normal thing for women in my town to do together, and now I'm just frustrated that it took so long for me to get initiated into the group! 

Kevin, Milsa's grandson, showing how we use handmade bags to carry heavy loads on our head.

Milsa hiked all of this back, plus some!

My gift for helping out- 7 plantains and 40 mini bananas- which she considered "hardly anything"

The trail to a finca 

A particularly nice cacao finca- it even has a nice trail through it! 

The Life of Chocolate

November is here and that means some awesome things are happening in Panama: Independence days (yes, plural) parades, random festivals, and most importantly... chocolate season.  

While chocolate (cacao) trees can produce fruit all year long, the biggest harvests are November-early January.  Having always been a chocolate lover, I was ecstatic to learn I'd be working with the production and processing of one of nature's most delicious fruits.  Though I've always preferred the business side of my job, even I have to admit that getting to work with each step of the chocolate process is pretty cool.

From pre-service training (PST) to chocolate week at in-service training to simply working with my neighbors in site, I've learned so much about chocolate this year and am excited to finally be blogging about it! 

Fun Facts

Cacao trees take 5 years to produce their first fruits, but can continue producing for ~50 years!

Ripe cacao pods are bright yellow, orange, and red and roughly the size of a nurf ball

The beans aren't brown- they're actually a deep purple until toasted

The milky white gel that surrounds each bean tastes like a watermelon jolly rancher

White chocolate is made by cooking the natural fats out of the darker chocolate

Cacao trees can only grow at certain latitudes 

The Ngäbere word for chocolate is Oreba

I can get a fist-sized ball of chocolate for 70¢... it's almost dangerous

Agroforestry

Cacao trees are generally started in small bags in a vivero- a tree nursery that provides partial shade and protection from the elements.  After a few months, they are ready to be planted in forested tropical areas with plenty of heat, sun, and rain.  Three-five years after planting, the trees should be producing their first harvests and with good care and maintenance can continue to produce chocolate for up to 50 years- though they generally produce their highest volume harvests between 10 and 20 years of age.  

Harvesting

Our trees produce the majority of their fruits between November and January, and when it's time to harvest, the whole family heads to the farm!  After being clipped from lower branches or guillotined off of higher ones, cacao pods are collected (usually in a backpack basket) and then cut open in order to get to the good stuff- cacao beans surrounded by a white, milky fruit. 

Processing

After being collected from their pods, cacao beans are fermented in wooden boxes for 3-7 days before being sun-dried for another ~10 days.  Some driers are much nicer than others and have rollaway rain covers or multiple floors, but the most basic option is a simple raised wooden platform.  Ideally, beans should be mixed with a wooden rake every few hours to ensure even drying.

Next, the cacao beans are toasted for up to an hour, thereby making your house smell wonderful. After they take a moment to cool off, the beans are then peeled.  At this point they're called nibs and can be eaten just like that.  They're pretty bitter and taste similar to a coffee bean.  To continue with the chocolate making process, the nibs are ground into a thick paste.  No liquids are added in this part- it becomes pasty thanks to all of the natural oils present in cacao!  If desired, you can then put the paste in molds (or banana leaves) to let them harden over the next few hours.  

Finally- chocolate!  Though expensive, modern machinery is needed to produce the smooth chocolate bars we buy in stores, there's something seriously delicious about eating the same chocolate you picked off the tree.   

Marketing and Selling

Depending on how the community intends to use or sell their cacao, from this point there's a few different routes they can take.  If they're using their cacao, the mothers of the family will likely heat the cocoa with water and sugar to make a dark hot cocoa which is delicious when cooked with lemongrass.  While some communities do sell fully processed chocolate bars, most sell the raw, dried beans to a cooperative or middleman who can then sell them on the international market.  Beans are usually cut in half and tested for moisture content and overall quality before an offer is made.  After that, the beans are packaged according to quality and are on their way to becoming the chocolate you know and love!

Interested in learning how to use cacao in baking or cooking recipes?  Check back next week for my favorite chocolate recipes!

Tech Week

In order to really hammer home the technical training we’ve had throughout the first four weeks, our group recently spent a week practicing what we’ve learned (and learning more!) at a Peace Corps site in the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle. 

The Comarca is the indigenous reservation here in Panama, but there are three parts for the three separate groups: Ngobe-Bugle, Kuna Yala, and Embera.  Although the culture completely varies from region to region, Ngobere people are generally known as being conservative and reserved; many places in the Comarca are also very impoverished, as was the town we visited. 

The houses were made with wood or plastic tarp walls, dirt floors, and zinc roofs, though many homes didn’t even have four full walls.  The living situation definitely made the week a trying one; while I had gotten used to not having running water, the muddy floors, un-cushioned, wooden beds, and chickens that slept (and pooped) in my room sometimes pushed me to my limits. 

But just when I would get down and start feeling sorry for myself, the kindness of the local people really overwhelmed me and reminded me why I’m here.  We each lived with host families for the week, and mine went above and beyond to give me everything they could.  They hardly eat ever eat meat, yet they slaughtered chickens so we could have it AND all seven of them slept in one bedroom so that another Peace Corps girl and I could have privacy in the other room.  They even bought hot chocolate to make for me when it rained so that I wouldn’t be cold.  

 Local school kids in their uniforms

A fish tank project

When we weren’t immersing ourselves in the local culture, we were out in the fields learning about Panama’s major crops from Agricultural experts who traveled out to our village to help with our training.  In the five days we were there we worked with rice, corn, yucca, plantains, beans, and also gave our own agricultural seminars to interested locals. 

A few weeks ago I could never have led a charla (short educational session) on agricultural/environmental topics.  Now I’m doing them in Spanish! 

Tech week was exhausting in every possible way.  Between the physical labor and major lack of nutritional food I was constantly tired, and being away from every type of modern comfort or amenity got to me a lot more than I thought it would.  But it was also really, really good.  I got to experience the success of a volunteer’s hard work and I got to see how dedicated Panama’s volunteers are- not only to their communities, but also to each other.  Now that is something that I cannot wait to be a part of. 

*Hugs and a big thank you to my dad this week.  The first day was really rough for me and I called him in tears.  After an encouraging conversation/reminder about all of the reasons I’m here, he left me reassuring voicemails every single morning for the rest of the week so that when I did have signal I always had something positive to listen to.  How great is that?!