Last week I was fortunate enough to visit the Granja Luker Cocoa Farm in Colombia.
Despite working with chocolate for 5 years this was my first visit to a cocoa farm and I was incredibly excited. Granja Luker is a 20 hectare farm located near the town of Palestina in Western Colombia. The farm was created in 1962 by Colombian chocolate maker CasaLuker who are one of our suppliers. Its main purpose is to improve production and conservation of cocoa fino de aroma (fine flavour cocoa) and it is one of the few research centres in the world specialising in cocoa. The work they do at Granja Luker improves the quality of cocoa grown throughout South America and the training they offer helps to improve crop yields for farmers who really on cocoa for their lively hood.
Together with me on the visit was Keith Hurdman from Thorntons, Grant Dalgleish from HB Ingredients and Mariana Arensburg from CasaLuker. We were given a presentation about the work at Granja Luker and a tour of the farm by Farm Manager Mauricio Salazar. Mauricio is a trained agronomist specialising in fruit and cocoa and chatting to him was especially interesting as I spent several years in my youth studying horticulture and agronomy (I specialised in Sports Turf) and I was surprised how much of my knowledge came back to me and was applicable to cocoa.
Granja Luker operates a innovative and highly advanced grafting system which allows them to take the very best of their Criollo and Trinitario cocoa plants and reproduce healthy and hardy cocoa seedlings. These seedlings are made available to cocoa farmers to increase the size of their farms or to replace ageing or poorly performing trees.
The farm also works on developing sustainable and ecologically sound planting models and grows a huge array of tropical fruits, palm trees and teak. These other crops provide shade for the cocoa plants and valuable alternate revenue streams for the cocoa farmers.
The highlight of my visit was planting my very own Chocolate Café cocoa tree and eating a delicious lunch of Bandeja Peisa (beans with pork scratchings, sausage & mince together with fried plantain, boiled rice, fried egg & avocado) and fresh lulo juice prepared by the ladies who work at the farm. I also took several of our handmade chocolate bars [pictured] so the farmers could taste the end product of all their hard work.
You can discover more about CasaLuker, GranjaLuker and Fino de Aroma cocoa here http://www.lukeringredients.com/index.php/en/granja-luker and you can purchase our handmade chocolate bars in our Ramsbottom store, by telephone mail order or online at www.chocolate-cafe.co.uk