Jorge Marún Ramírez takes me to their herb garden and I am invited to pick a leaf from a Stevia plant which was very pleasant, as the last item I consumed a few hours beforehand was a raw cocoa bean from the pod which, I am sure many of you know, is somewhat bitter.
Jorge then invites me to walk with him in the well tendered ‘family gardens’ and it appears that they can grow almost anything. Not only are there things to eat, but the most amazing tropical flowers are growing all around me in this magical landscape.
The farm is huge: 100 hectares of palm, 400 of cocoa and 700 of bananas with other supplementary crops, with 300 hectares of banana that they grow for themselves. I am thinking what a heavenly life it is, to grow all you can eat. They even had honey, in fact they hardly ever need, I am told, to go to a supermarket and now; not even for chocolate.
As Jorge and I walk together in his tropical garden – it felt more like I was having a guided tour of West London’s Kew Botanical gardens!
Angus Kennedy: Tell me a bit about the farm and your family. It’s really beautiful around here, an oasis of taste and beauty. How did all of this happen?
Jorge Marún Ramírez: Thank you Angus. We are very pleased to welcome the first European journalist to our farm too! My family came from the Lebanon in the early 1900’s, making me part of the 4th generation of cocoa growers. The farmhouse where I live now was once my father’s, along with the farm. We own this farm that is currently 1,000 hectares; 400 of cocoa and the rest is bananas, palm oil and rice. We have around 350 employees. It’s really hard to believe that we started with just 50 hectares of bananas. We have been producing cocoa beans right from the start.
AK: Yes, I love it here, tell me how have you kept it going so long?
JMR: If you are not efficient, it’s not possible to achieve sustainability. This is the first thing we focus on, before thinking about the other fundamentals. It is hugely important to take care of the environment, as well as the people; you have to take social responsibility. We produce solely at this farm (single source) and our production here serves two main purposes; social and environmental. We try to educate our farmers as best as possible – without an educated farmer, it is impossible to talk to our workers about taking care of the environment. For example, we keep bees and often give the honey to the local people in the area. This is so they can sell the honey themselves, which in turn, improves livelihoods in the surrounding communities. We also monitor the honey for pesticides, so we can ensure that these don’t pollute the natural environment.
AK: A nice touch Jorge, and of course you have cocoa and a lot of it I see! What is so special about the cocoa here?
Sacks of cocoa can be found all over the plantation as well as in the Hacienda itself
JMR: We have just planted a new variety of cocoa here, launched only last year. This is a bean only grown in Ecuador, so we are hoping for a very different flavour to anything that has been produced before. Right now, we are trying to measure the productivity - although it is being grown within various projects around the country, we are looking for a more diverse genome than others that are being grown at the moment. I really believe that the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ chocolate is how the cocoa has been fermented. Here, we harvest beans every week and then start the fermentation process immediately which is much more efficient than picking the beans all at once. It’s quite exciting as cocoa has been cultivated here for around 300 years but we have only just begun to make our own chocolate, which we started producing around three years ago. The principal process hasn’t really changed for that long, but we are using technology that was developed from years of banana production and netting 2.3 tons per hectare. Therefore, we are currently producing around 800 tons of cocoa a year now.
KennedysConfection.com
Kennedy’s Confection January 2020 13
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