World Food Day

I took the following quote out of my “Organic Bytes” newsletter put out by the Organic Consumers Association.   Look for the implied definition of organic, and then think about whether this statement is true if only applied to the US.

“Organic agriculture puts the needs of rural people and the sustainable use of natural resources at the centre of the farming system. Locally adapted technologies create employment opportunities and income. Low external inputs minimize risk of indebtedness and intoxication of the environment. It increases harvests through practices that favor the optimization of biological processes and local resources over expensive, toxic and climate damaging agro-chemicals…in response to a frequently asked question: Yes, the world can be fed by the worldwide adoption of Organic agriculture. The slightly lower yields of Organic agriculture in favorable, temperate zones are compensated with approximately 10-20% higher yields in difficult environments such as arid areas.”

-International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements World Food Day, October 12, 2009

 

Tortilla Days

The handiwork of Maria from La Rinconada, a village in the north of the department of León

In the villages the tortilla is one of the main staples in the Nicaraguan diet.  It is also one of the main jobs for women.  In the two villages where I visited this past weekend, one woman in every house spent hours a day preparing corn and making tortillas.

The corn for tortillas is prepared the day before.  The white kernels of dried corn are boiled in water and ashes, which, as you can imagine, results in a large unappetizing gray lumpy mess.  This age old process is called nixtamalization. The alkaline ashes free an amino acid called tryptophan which makes the corn digestable and more nutritious.  The process also causes the outer husk of the kernals to split and peel off.

Mixing in the corn and ash at Melaña's house, also in La Rinconada.

The following morning the corn is washed (the waste water with the kernal peels fed to pigs or dogs) and hand ground.  Tina, in Lagartillo, always uses a metate (a kind of stone morter and pestle) to further grind the masa, but some people skip this extra step, or send the masa through the grinder a second time.  Each tortilla is hand formed, first into a thick pancake and then patted out slowly into a thin smooth disk.  Every tortilla has a face – the side

Many Nicaraguans, even in the city, cook over open fire. This is a more effecient and healthy wood stove, as it burns less wood and has a chimney to carry the smoke outside. The fire is underneath, and the two griddles are resting on open holes. Pots are also put right on the open fire, or ontop of a griddle to simmer.

you pat on.  When you put the tortilla onto the comal (a ceramic griddle used exclusively for tortillas) the face has to go down.  When there is steam escaping from the center of the tortilla, it’s time to flip it.  Tina has a special method of flipping, where she puts the back of the tips of her fingers on the edge of the tortilla.  They stick slightly, just enough for her to life her hand and slip her thumb underneath, grab the edge, and flip.  I’ve managed to do this once or twice, but not without getting a nice blister on the back side of my middle finger.  After another minute the tortilla is flipped one final time.  This is the test flip – if the masa separates and the tortilla puffs up like a balloon, you’ve made an excellent tortilla!

Making tortillas with Maria. I'm grinding. Maria grinds eight mill-fulls of corn a day for her large family.

There are endless varieties of tortillas.  Every household seems to have it’s signature.  Tina’s are medium sized, very finely textured, and have a wonderful flavor from the corn her family grows.  In another village called La Rinconada, Maria’s tortillas are nearly twice the size.  Her hard working sons and husband eat two in each meal, six a day, and that makes for an enormous amount of tortilla making.  She speeds up the process by skipping the ‘fine grind’, which changes the texture but they are just as flavorful.  In the city many people use Maseca, a pre-processed fine corn flour for tortillas.  I’ve used this in the states because it’s available almost everywhere, but after eating the real thing I definitely notice the difference.  A flat, sourish taste and smell.  Fresh ingredients and the extra work of starting from scratch definitely make a difference.

 

Quick updates

Theo!

The little bits and pieces of recent life in León:

A new addition to Nick’s house is Theo, a manx kitten.  He loves playing with feet, plastic bags, shoes, ants (go get’um hunter!) and climbing up the legs of my jeans so that I walk around with a kitten clinging to my hip and meowing frantically.

Yesterday NicaNet, the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network, published their October-September Monitor (monthly newsletter), with an article I wrote on the front page!  It’s a substantial piece, different from the ones I posted earlier on the Fulbright blog.  You can look at the whole publication on their website (linked above), or read just the SosteNica article here.

Last week there was a fantastic street theater performance by my friend Sobeyda.  She is in a theater troupe funded by the European Union, and worked with a rural community south of Managua to create a 1.5 hour long performance about the importance of preserving Nicaraguan culture in the face of globalization.  It was filled with stiltwalking, singing, dancing, and a participatory discussion afterward.  About 500 people crammed into the central square to watch.

Sobeyda (right), as a campasino woman, one of the many characters she played in the peice.

Running off to Achuapa and El Sauce for a long weekend, to catch this theater peice another time, visit some friends in their villages, and work with CEPRODEL in El Sauce on Tuesday.  El Sauce and Achuapa are part of the department of León, but in the beginning of the northern mountains.  I’m looking forward to a cooler climate and the gorgeous views.

 

Coffee Break 3

Ariel has only worked at CECOCAFEN for eight months. Since he began, he has been meeting with each cooperative individually to evaluate and improve their managerial systems and distribution of technical resources to members.

The following day we visited another Union of Cooperatives, CECOCAFEN, and farmer Byron Corales Martinez.
CECOCAFEN works with nine cooperatives, which collectively have over 2000 individual producers. Nicolas and Mickey signed contracts to buy more organic coffee, and Nestor went over the production details with Ariel, their director of technical assistance.  CECOCAFEN has also worked with several environmental projects and supported the formation of a women’s saving group, which provides a possible infrastructure to channel the funds to recognize the unpaid work of women.  One of the specific difficulties that the farmers are facing right now is that many of the coffee plants are over 25 years old, the age at which production begins to decrease.  However, renovating their plantations means pulling the producing plants out and planting ones which will not produce for three years, and the farmers cannot afford to loose those years of production right now.  Because the payback for renovating is over such a long time span, there is virtually no credit available to farmers for this specific activity.  Partially for that reason, CECOCAFEN has supported farm diversification, linking their coop members to groups supporting other agricultural crops so they aren’t solely relying on coffee income.

The Cooperativa Solidaridad also has a nice little cupping lab.

After CECOCAFEN we briefly stopped at Cooperative Solidaridad, a small cooperative on the road back toward Jinotega, and then headed out to visit the farm of Byron Corales Martinez, an organic farmer who was an original member of the cooperative but now sells independant of any group or certification.

Byron and Mickey (right). With my help translating they got along fantastically. Mickey's experience with organic farming in Vancouver and his views on fair trade from the perspective of a coffee roaster resonated with the direction Byron has taken his farm. A business - and friendship - success.

Don Byron is an entrepreneur.  It was immediately clear that he is a strong, passionate guy.  He’s pulled out of fair trade certification because he said all they were concerned about was money, and his concept of fair trade was alot more inclusive.  He said before he entered Fair Trade, he had used $4,000 from profits from his coffee business to start a school in the community, but the high fees he paid to be certified didn’t allow him to continue contributing.  He also is working with a large community initiated conservation project to protect over 1,000 hectares of forest which contain sources of water that benefit three municipalities and a hydroelectric plant.  Fair Trade, he says, didn’t support any of the environmental standards that he considers essential for a true high quality product. So now he sells directly to contacts he’s made personally – kind of like an international coffee CSA type business model.  The buyers have to come to his farm, where they see his cultivation methods and the environmental and social projects he contributes to. He is selling to three different buyers on the west coast of the US.

The drought has provoked some strange coffee growth. This plant has red cherries, green cherries, and flowers at the same time, which Byron said is extremely strange.

At the farm, we got a tour and a well-rehearsed presentation.  It started with Byron asking us, “Do you know where the flavor of coffee comes from?”  The answer, it turns out, is the soil.  Byrons soil is carefully managed with biofermento, a homemade liquid fertilizer that promotes the action of microorganisms, mulch to preserve humidity, and lots of cow manure.  He’s worked out all the calculations.  “One cow gives me about 30 lbs. of manure a day.  That’s enough to fertilize 7 coffee plants.  From those 7 plants I’ll get about 60 lbs of beans which will make about 600 cups of coffee.  At $1.50 a cup in your coffee shop, it means that my 30 lbs. of cow manure is worth…$900!”  Byrons cultivation methods are strongly rooted in biodynamics.  He plants and prunes according to moon phases, and focuses alot of his attention of soil structure, organic fertilization, and remineralization with rock powder.  He feeds his cattle a mixture of 17 different plants, to ensure a rich mineral content in the manure.  He farms seven different varieties of coffee on 28 hectares, including a variety called Marracatura which has won first prize at an international coffee convention.

Byron introduced us to a class of young students learning English at a school bordering the farm, a project that he set up with a friend of his who was recently deported from the U.S. and is using his acquired English to teach the students. They treated us to a performance of some songs they have been learning.

 

Coffee Break 2

The wooden sign outside the SOPPEXCCA cafe in Jinotega

Wednesday afternoon we set off for Jinotega, to a union of coffee cooperatives called SOPPEXCCA.  There are 15 cooperatives in the union, made up of 650 individual producers.  The reason for the trip was so that Mickey from Salt Spring Coffee could sign contracts to purchase a container of their organic coffee, and also so that Nestor, a Nicaraguan from León who has been working for nine years in renewable energy, could meet with their technical coordinator and get all the information needed to calculate the net carbon produced from farm to port.

SOPPEXCCA is a relatively new union, founded in 1999, and has clear social and environmental commitments.  They have a program called “Muchachitos de Cafe” which funds environmental education, sports, and cultural events in the schools where members children attend, and have worked

Nestor and Rigorberto talking at the Cafe

collaboratively with the National Institution for Agriculture and Forestry to mark out conservation lands on individual farms.  They are currently planning an organic insecticide and fertilizer plant at one of the beneficios with BIOLATINA, the region’s organic certification board, to supply members with better quality organic amendments. Part of Mickeys intention by buying directly from the cooperatives is to establish his own “fair trade” standards, by buying coffee that isn’t certified and investing the money he saves directly into the community that is growing the coffee.  In this case, the money will be used to create a carbon neutral chain by investing in renewable energy projects (Nestor’s job is figuring out how much CO2 we need to sink or save to counter what is produced, as well as proposing the type and quantity of an appropriate renewable energy technology), and investing in a women’s fund.  The goal with the fund is to recognize the unpaid work of women.  Cooking and serving meals to workers, pitching in extra hours during harvest or when there is a family emergency, washing clothes, and managing the campesino households are examples of how women ’subsidize’ the price of coffee.  An organized group of women within SOPPEXCCA will make all the decisions for what kinds of activities the funds will be used for.

Our coffees on the beautiful wooden tables that are decorated with cleaned, dried, and roasted beans

The SOPPEXCCA offices have a beautiful coffee shop on one side, with a cupping laboratory that was part of a project about five years ago to empower the voices of the cooperatives in international trade dialogue by teaching them to evaluate their own coffee in the same way the traders do.  The buildings are beautifully designed, with wooden panels and bright tiles.  Fatima Ismael Espinosa, the general manager of the coop, invited us to cappucinos and lattes.

It was exciting listening to Rigoberto, the Coordinator of the 8 technical assistants,  list how much relevant information they already have from the 15 cooperatives.  They have maps of forested areas, recorded numbers of trees they have planted every year, and a project to install more efficient wood burning stoves to cut down on firewood use.

Two reflections from this visit:  that cooperatives can be a very effective and empowering way to bring both financial and technical resources to farmers, and that those resources are more easily available for high value export crops like coffee, which recieve a fair amount of international attention.

With Fatima, SOPPEXCCAs General Manager

 

Coffee Break

My project is focused in the department of León, mostly in areas where the low hot pacific plains make cattle farming, sugar cane, and peanuts the principal agricultural crops.   The largest agricultural export in Nicaragua, coffee, is mostly concentrated in the northern mountains.  I haven’t spent very much time focusing on coffee in the eight months I’ve been here, so I took a two day trip to Jinotega and Matagalpa with Nicolas and Mickey McCloud, a coffee roaster from Salt Spring Coffee in Vancouver Canada, where he signed contracts to buy organic coffee directly from the cooperatives.

Rachel setting up the coffee cupping

Rachel Archer, who has worked with fair trade coffee and is currently working part time developing some national marketing strategies with several coffee cooperatives, gave us a good send-off with a coffee cupping here at Nicolas’ house in Leon.  I’ve never cupped coffee before, and really only started drinking coffee this year, and I learned alot during our little excercise.

She started by lining up five different ground coffees, four Nicaraguan and one Costa Rican, and we rated and described them by appearance and fragrance of the grounds.  Then she added boiling water to some grounds, and we described the aroma of the liquid coffee.  Then we each “broke” a glass of coffee, by sinking the grounds with a spoon while smelling carefully and noting whether the aroma changed while we stirred.  After that came the tasting – dipping a spoon in the cup, slurping the coffee along with some air, swishing it around in your mouth and then spitting it out and trying to lucidly describe what you just experienced.  I found this excercise challenged my readily available flavor vocabulary, and also taught me alot about what I like and don’t like in coffee.  Don’t like light roasts, and don’t like stale coffee.

We finished by choosing our favorites and discussing the differences between the five coffees.  Rachel revealed to us which was which, and we looked at the packaging for the different coffees to see which ones we felt were most appealing if we were tourists here buying presents for friends at home.  I really enjoyed that part.   The label is such an important place to incorporate beautiful pictures and important information, to appeal to a variety of consumers.   A good combination of art, agriculture, and food.  Mmmhmm.

Our package selection. Which one would you buy?

Rachel setting up the coffee cupping

Coming next:  Our visit to the first cooperative in Jinotega.

 

Travel Blog

Social Enterprise Associates just published a piece I wrote for them on their website.  You can read it here.  The pictures aren’t mine, they must have gotten scrambled, so come back here, facebook me, or look at my flickr site (link in the side bar) to see pictures of Nagarote and my work.

The Fulbright Student Blog also published virtually the same piece, slightly different, but with my photos and captions.

 

Chaparrónes

It’s now raining in León nearly every day, which is doing absolutely wonderful things for farmers as well as the afternoon temperature here (I was actually chilled the other evening after showering).

I’ve heard that “it doesn’t rain but it pours” applies literally here.  There have been some nice gentle showers here, but more often than not the rain is royally announced with giant cracks of thunder and then dumps una tromba de agua, or an absolute wall of water.  The city streets, which are a patchwork of adoquines (like cobblestones, octagonal cinderblocks) and pavement, don’t do a very good job of absorbing water , and there are certain streets that fill up with water and quickly become rivers.

The corner by the supermarket Salman is one such street.  I was trapped for forty five minutes in the supermarket until the water receded enough to reveal the sidewalks.  The water rose rapidly; I was only in the supermarket for about fifteen minutes, and it wasn’t raining when I went in.  The current was so strong that it pulled a motorcyle around and nearly swept away a young kid who messing around and trying to cross.

Last week I tried taking a taxi about twelve blocks to a friends house during a chaparrón.  We left my house and got about halfway there when we reached a road that had such high water and strong current that the taxi wouldn’t even try to cross it.  I could feel the waves beating up against the floor of the taxi.  We turned around and went back to my house.  Now I understand how things here stop completely for rain – it isn’t just that Nicas are allergic to getting wet, it does actually stop you from getting where you want sometimes!

 

When Weeds are Friends

Client x requested the release of a portion of his credit to hire workers to weed his field of sesame.  The sesame is small due to the lack of rain, and the weeds are doing what weeds do best – using what little moisture there is very efficiently and quickly catching up to the sesame.  Edgard decided not to release the credit to the farmer just yet, for various reasons.

- Because the sesame is underdeveloped and has not established extensive root systems yet, the weeds will help hold the dry powdery soil in place and prevent erosion during a typically powerful  October rainstorm

- The leaf cover provided by the weeds preserves what little moisture there is in the soil, making it accessible for the sesame as well.

- The weeds also reduce the amount of mud that splashes up onto the sesame when it rains, which helps protect the sesame from diseases like phytophthera that can stay dormant in the soil until they come in contact with vegetation.

This isn´t the first weedy field that I´ve come across in Nicaragua.  In March, while with a guide in San Rafael del Norte, we passed a field that looked to me like a disaster.  A pasture for cattle? No, a bean field.  I commented that that poor farmer lost the weeding game because you could barely see the bean plants.  No, the guide said, that’s what a good bean field looks like.  When you harvest, you cut the weeds at the same time.  First you pile the weeds into piles, then pull out the bean plants and put them on top of the piles of weeds to dry.  Like in the sesame field, the weeds protect the crop from soil contact, and contact with the molds or diseases living in the soil.

In the states, weeds are the number one reason why organic farmers lose crops.  Labor is so expensive that if the weeds drown a field the labor to harvest combined with the smaller size of the product due to competition with the weeds means the entire crop is no longer profitable.  For that reason I have spent unimaginable numbers of hours on tractors and hand weeding to prevent crops from getting to that point.  Here is seems that there is a more compassionate relationship between weeds and organic farmers.

In addition to lots of weeds, last season's corn is sprouting amongst the beans, which shows that this farmer has a good crop rotation

 

El Niño

Thursday it rained in Nagarote for the first time in 48 days.

This is the winter, or rainy season, when small farmers plant and harvest all their corn, sorghum, beans, and pasture for the whole year.  In October the rains will cease, and not start again until May.

Normally, there is a month-long dry spell that starts around the middle of June called the Canicula, or mini-summer.  This year it just kept going, and going.  Thursday morning I was visiting clients with Luis Rivas from CEPRODEL, and we kept hearing the same stories.  “I haven’t been able to plant corn, or sorghum, because it’s too dry.”  Here people often say caer agua, or water that falls, instead of lluvia, the word for rain.  “Tengo que esperar hasta que cae agua!” Everyone is working hard to keep the trees from the reforestation project alive.  We timed the project so that the trees would be distributed at the beginning of the rainy season and would be well established by the time summer hit, but we didn’t anticipate the arrival of el niño this year.

A dry struggling sesame field

Friday I visited some agricultural clients with Edgard, from the León office.  The soy, sesame, and yucca were established, seeded in the early months of winter when it was raining.  The crops were all showing signs of stress, however.  On some plants up to a third of the flowers in the soy, which is just beginning to set fruit, where dried and brown.  The sesame, which should be over a foot by now, was stunted at a couple inches, but still alive. Edgard and I discussed the factors involved in deciding whether to release the next round of credit for the farms.

Agricultural crop credit works differently that urban loans or even loans to buy cattle.  Because of the long season for crops like yucca (seven months from seeding to harvesting, not including soil preparation) and the incontrolable weather risks involved, credit is not dispersed all at once.  A farmer works out a plan with the CEPRODEL officer, how much they need for soil preparation, to purchase seeds, to hire labor for planting and weeding, and to harvest.  The amounts for each activity are released only when they happen, not months ahead of time. This way, if the crop dies during a drought, or if the harvest is significantly lower than expected, the farmer is only in debt part of what he intended to take out. The client also only pays interest on the portion he has been given, so the delayed payment also helps keep the loan affordable.  The farmer can also choose not to withdraw the whole credit if it isn’t needed.

All loans are given for specific activities, and amounts vary depending on the crop the farmer wants to plant.  The timeline, cost of labor, and cost of supplies are standardized for many crops, and are tailored to the acreage of each client.  But the ‘flexibility’ of tailoring each credit personally results in an inflexible credit at the end of the day.  One of the farmers we visited was frustrated, because he had solicited credit for yucca and sesame, and he hasn’t been able to seed the sesame because of el niño. He is running out of time, because even if it starts to rain regularly this week, there probably aren’t enough weeks of rain left to ensure a good sesame harvest.  He could plant beans, which require less time.  That is probably what he will do, but he won’t be able to use credit to buy the seeds without returning to the office and re-working his plan with Edgard to tailor it to beans instead of sesame. I can understand how that is frustrating, on the other hand it seems like the rules are there for the farmers advantage in the long run.

When it did rain in Nagarote in the afternoon the sun burned through the clouds to the west adding theatrical lighting to the long awaited storm.