Day 3 - Visit to a chocolate factory, a little photography, and a lot of plants!

We headed out on some crazy mud roads an hour and a half away to visit a local farm & chocolate factory, with a few minor issues on the way, the roads are that bad that the Van bottomed out...so we were stuck for a little while, but Rodrigo and our driver managed to get us back on the road again, with only a slight traffic jam!

The farm is a true example of entrepreneurship, the owner has had a business in the cereal industry, and wine as well, and they have now turned there hands to Cocoa. They have 250 hectares of land, and started with just 50 hectares in use (now 70). The really amazing things is that they do everything, from growing the beans, harvesting, cleaning the pulp, fermentation, splitting into Cocoa powder, Cocoa butter, combining the ingredients, grinding, turning into chocolate, molding and producing some artisan premium chocolate, then not only that, but they also own 3 shops and 3 franchises to sell around 100kg of chocolate today, a true end to end supply chain.

It was brilliant to tour around and see the production facilities and it highlighted some of the differences between the MCCS centre and a commercial operation. Whats interesting is that this farm has only been in contact with the MCCS for the last 4 months, but it sounds like there is a lot of room for collaboration in the future.

As you can also see from the rather spectacular images, in between this learning we had a lot of fun feeding a chopper, tasting chocolate, pretending to drive tractors and then heading out being towed by on a bob cat tour.

We then headed to the local villages, the first chance I've had so far to get my camera out (we've had a phenomenal photographer with us for the trip to ensure we are paying attention and learning and not spending our time taking pictures!). I’ve enjoyed getting some pictures of the locals and the area, as well as our hosts and fellow ambassadors.

The afternoon was spent at the MCCS for a lesson in the diseases affecting the cocoa crops, mainly Witches Broom and Black Pod, and the efforts to try and minimize the damage through breeding disease resistant crops. 

Then a session on cross pollination, trying to cross highly productive plants with those with a good disease resistance to get the best of both worlds. We even managed to try our hands at manual cross pollination of two species.

At the MCCS there is an extensive breeding program taking place to try and find plants that display all of the positive traits we look for in cocoa, high yield, good resistance and good flavour, but each time you add a desired trait you need to effectively double the number of trees in your sample, so when looking for 5 or 6 positive traits you need thousands of plants …a huge undertaking…just to get to 2 or 3 desirable specimens!