*I will start by caveating everything I am saying below...

I am 100% biased.

I love cacao! Straight up, I really, really love cacao!

Where to start...

Well, it goes way back to my time working in an office in London, let's say around 2013. I worked with a Ghanaian woman. She was very proud of her country and their food. One day she brought into the office what she called Ghanaian Chocolate. I tried it, anticipating the usual sweet flavours I had become accustomed to over the years of indulging in the supermarket selections. And I hated it! The whole office joked about how disgusting it was. So, so bitter! This was not chocolate in my eyes. Horrible!

It was another 5 years before I had my next encounter with "chocolate". By this time, I had left the rat race and had started building a community in Colombia. The parents of one of the girls I lived with had a farm nearby, and one day they brought with them some of their own produce. I was introduced to the cacao bean, which I was told was where chocolate comes from. People called it the Chocolate Tree just to help me get my head around where chocolate actually comes from. I ate the fermented and dried beans raw. Kind of okay, but definitely not something I was excited about. We then did the grinding process to turn the beans into an oily goo, which was then poured into moulds and left to set. The next morning it was like a brick. Being greedy, and when no one was looking, I cut off a rather large slice and helped myself.

Disgusting!! Bitter, bitter, bitter! What the hell is this "foreign" chocolate all about? It brought back the memories of the Ghanaian Chocolate and again I was not impressed with what Colombians were trying to tell me about their produce. This was not chocolate. Chocolate is sweet! This is not!

By this stage in my life, I had also become very health conscious. I was living in community and investing a lot of time and energy in the land, and receiving the benefit of growing my own food and just all-round receiving the understanding that food is medicine, and that anything that is grown directly from the earth without the use of any chemicals, and grown with love and care, is by far the best food on planet Earth. Finally, I was open to receive cacao in its real form.

Everything changed that evening when we had our first hot chocolate brew.

With a little bit of panela, Colombia's version of raw cane sugar, also 100% natural, 100% pure, and made with intention and held at the fire in community, this warm, silky smooth beverage entered my being and warmed my whole body. And it was delicious! I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

And from that moment there have not been many days I have gone without a cacao brew. That's 8 years of essentially being with this plant every day.

What can I say, I went from an accountant in London to a cacao farmer in a very short space of time.

The dream is to cultivate an incredible cacao from the land where I live in the Sierra Nevada, Colombia. So far I have planted close to 100 cacao trees. The oldest are a little less than 2 years old. Some of these have been grafted and thus take on the DNA of a much more mature tree and could give fruit in the next year or two. One hundred trees is not that many, but it is a starting point I am very happy with.

These trees were planted into an area of the land which already had good shade and a lot of biomass. The conditions were perfect to plant into. The rest of the land is asking for a lot of love and care. The previous owners had cut down many of the trees, encroached onto the protected nature reserve above the land, and mono-cropped the land for yuca (cassava). The soil has turned to sand in some areas. Years of heavy rains washing away the topsoil. This land needs a lot of love.

This is my main focus. To grow soil.

This is a long process. It could require a few years of planting out all of the support trees and plants and recycling those back into the earth before the soil is ready to support more cacao trees. I am under no illusion. And equally, I am in no rush.

Just like Bitcoin, permaculture is a low time preference gig. Thinking way down the line, understanding all of the steps that are necessary before getting to that magic moment of harvesting the cacao.

Bitcoin has really helped with this process because it takes a lot of pressure off me to obtain a yield straight away. I know in the background Bitcoin is doing its thing. Yes, sometimes very frustratingly, but over time, we know how it works, and this protects me from wasting a lot of time, energy, and resources on pushing a high time preference objective, like planting cacao for profit.

I see it a lot with coffee, and it is the same with cacao. As soon as the commodities price exchange goes up, every farmer scrambles to plant as much as they can to take advantage of the high prices, only to see that by the time they receive a harvest, the market has been flooded and the price is low again. This high time preference approach almost always leads to soil degradation as well. Over-farmed, over-treated, and under-loved.

Thank you, Bitcoin, and thank you, Cacao!

I pray that we can continue to work closely together and that, with good intent, with love for the land at the centre of all decision-making, one day in the future I will present to the Nostr/Bitcoin community the cacao that comes from my labour of love!! This is the dream!

If anyone wants to come and plant some cacao trees, September/October is prime time!! You are most welcome to come and stay!

Big love to all,

Bitcoin Beans