Papaya Circles and Stevia

Late last week, Manuel told me that the paper was predicting a long, hot and dry ‘summer’. Well, naturally, the last few days have been cold and wet. Good thing because our long awaited papaya seedlings arrived on Monday and we were able to get them planted yesterday. We now have two papaya circles ready for production. We have had the mulch mountain operating inside each circle for three months so there is already a good amount of compost and, therefore, available nutrients for the seedlings. Will see how they grow. One of the circles has ten seedlings and the other nine (one of us can’t count obviously). The bananas in our banana circle are now over one metre high and putting out their second leaves. They should start growing fairly quickly after that.

Three months ago, I gave a packet of Stevia seeds to Santos to try his luck with. I was encouraged by the fact that well over twenty sprouts were in evidence when I last visited him. However, the final tally was two plants. He sent one to us and is keeping the other at his place to, hopefully, replicate by taking cuttings – eventually. There has to be some way of making these silly things grow but I haven’t found it yet. For obvious reasons, the commercial growers of Stevia in Paraguay and China are not very forthcoming with propagation techniques. Stevia, a natural sweetner that is native to Central and South America (in one subspecies or another) has so many wonderful qualities for use here in Honduras. A sweetner that has no calories, no ill effects on teeth and poses no problems for diabetics has great potential. When one sees the crippling hold that the sugar companies and their followers (Coca-cola, Pepsi, etc.) have on this country and its people it makes one hope fervently that there is an alternative that can be grown and utilized quietly and without large company control.

While I was away, I found out, Julia and Manuel took turns staying in my house so that there would be no break ins. It is touching to be a beneficiary of such kindness. One also learns that when you keep your wardrobe to one or two small plastic bags or one cardboard carton, you can move anywhere with great facility.

On the bus from San Pedro Sula yesterday, I had a long conversation with a fellow who works in the poultry industry. Here in Honduras, the poultry industry is controlled by one multinational corporation, Cargill. They own the feed mills, the grow operations, the processing plants and the distribution networks. They don’t, as far as I know, control the egg industry but, with their control of feed prices, certainly can influence it.

A private grower can contract with the Cargill conglomerate to grow birds. But, after cost of feed and labour he only clears about five cents a bird (if I heard the figures correctly). That does not leave any room for error or disease.

Cargill, in their barns can have one man care for 20,000 birds if there is no automatic equipment. With automatic feeders one man can care for 70,000 birds. Considering that these men are paid about $200.00 a month you can see that they don’t lose much profit in wages.

The man I talked to was considering ways to grow birds on a smaller scale and do his own marketing. It was a pleasure to talk to someone who was looking outside of the large, mechanized box. He had obviously done his homework in some of the areas and realized that one person plucking and drawing chickens the old fashioned way by hand could still do 80 birds a day. So, a family operation could easily manage 1000 birds a week without needing a plant. We talked about alternative feedstuffs that grow here and how they could be prepared without large equipment, especially for small numbers of birds (1000 birds is small in poultry terms – sigh). I think he could do very well with 300 birds a week if he can find or grow the feedstuffs and not have to resort to Cargill prices.

As is so often the case in the countries I have lived in, there is the huge, conglomerate type operation and the totally haphazard backyard casual approach with nothing in between. This means, of course, there is a huge, empty playing field for the knowledgeable person who is also willing to do a moderate amount of physical work along with careful management. Too little effort has been placed on developing agriculture in this area. As well, too little effort has been placed on realizing the opportunities for minimal equipment type operations that combine low tech equipment and regular manual labour.

Low labour costs and very modest living costs means that operations can be much smaller and much simpler and still provide a similar lifestyle result to much larger operations in Canada.

We tried Sweet Potato leaves on Monday at lunch time. These leaves have high levels of calcium, protein, Vitamin A and C and iron. We simply steamed them and then put them into some coconut water. We chopped up the coconut meat but it didn’t flavour the combination like I had hoped. Need to grind it somehow. The leaves weren’t bad but not a taste treat. Will try them with onions, tomatoes and cheese to see if we can’t make them more palatable. Three of us had had lots of greens in our lifetime so we found the leaves quite acceptable. The two younger people hadn’t eaten lots of greens so found them less appetizing. Fortunately I had made meatballs and vegetables in a cream sauce so there was a good filler dish to make up for the greens.

Bryan