El Mayoreo

March 9, 2016March 9, 2016 / Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment

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The Mayoreo is the largest farmer’s market in Alajuela and my weekly or bimonthly visits have become one of my favorite routine outings. I can’t claim that it has been so since the beginning, but I have progressively deciphered the persuasive “charm” of the sellers and come to appreciate the fidelity of buyer-seller kinships.

My first visit to the Mayoreo was overwhelming. There are rows upon rows of vibrantly colored produce and fruit, people swaying with the rhythm of the crowds, and farmers howling prices in the noisy air. I felt lost. I had no idea where to start, so I committed to the first row I came upon and looked for the items that were written on my grocery list. My tactic consisted of timidly shuffling towards a stand until the vendor took notice of the potential “business” opportunity and in a boisterous yet coaxing manner lured me closer to his stand. I tried my hardest to blend in with the crowd and give the impression of being an experienced buyer, but the buyer/seller dynamic was a whole different dimension that I would not be able to comprehend and employ until several more visits.

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Notes from the Garden: Building a house or a vegetable cage?

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / 2 Comments

Measuring the length of our new monkey-protected area in the organic farm at Cardamom County

Building a 15 meter x 20 meter vegetable cage is no small feat. The last estimate we had was that it would cost about 4 lakhs, which is apparently the cost of a small house. A lakh is a unit in the South Asian numbering system equivalent to 100,000. So, is 400,000 rupees worth it for a vegetable cage? I think spending energy to get a smarter design would be more worth it.

With the help of Raxa Collective’s head engineer, it is very likely we will be able to lower that cost significantly. As I talked about in my post about quantifying farm-to-table, I think that with a combination of lowering the cost and then taking advantage of the monkey-protected area as vigorously as possible with efficient use of the space, it will be worth it. There are elements of farm-to-table that are not quantifiable but can be seen in the overall conservation story of supporting smart land-use practices.

At the end of the day, at least the food here is locally sourced mostly from the Cumbum vegetable market in Tamil Nadu. This market is only about 25 km away and the farmers in that market are relatively close. This is far better then the way most food is sourced in the United States.

In the United States, eating local is a challenge. Most agriculture in the states is for corn and soybeans, rather than vegetables. And “local” is difficult when the local environment has few green spaces left, let alone farmland. So even though we don’t have “monkey-challenges” to growing our food locally in the states, we have monocultures and rapid suburbanization keeping us farther and farther away from fresh food. Continue reading →

Notes from the Garden: Quantifying Farm-to-Table

July 17, 2014July 17, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / 7 Comments

We are in process of building a monkey-proofed area of the garden. You can see my past post to get a feel for the evolution of this idea. The main issue with providing the Cardamom County restaurant with food from the on-site organic farm is monkeys. We were inspired by these subsistence farmers in Ixopo, South Africa, who blogged about building their monkey-proof vegetable cage. They, too, are neighbors with a nature reserve, so their situation is quite similar to Cardamom County! Now, we are on our way to having a truly farm-to-table menu!

Here is the cage we are modeling ours after. Check out their blog: http://foodieschannel.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-isnt-really-recipe-but-its-about.html

You may be wondering, why is there all this buzz these days about farm-to-table? There is more to it than just fresh, delicious food.

Obviously, a lot of nature gets destroyed for agricultural purposes. In the United States, so much land gets wasted on sprawling, inefficient development. In the in-between spaces, you could feed a nation. But we eat up our open, natural spaces for agriculture. Our agriculture is rarely local so it leads to problems of unnecessary carbon emissions from transport and a lot of not-fresh food in grocery stores. When we can use the land we have already developed on to provide the people there with food, why spread ourselves out so thin into nature? Continue reading →