Our trees will not bear fruit for five years. In the meantime we need to generate income to care for them and continue development of the farm. We planted an understory crop of pineapples: fifty thousand pineapples! This sounds like a lot but in reality it’s a relatively small plantation. Pineapples don’t need much water or other inputs compared to other plants. They are also perennial so after the first planting we can get multiple harvests.
These pineapples come from a chemical farm in a cooler region and they are in the process of adapting to this environment and growing the microbial soil associations necessary to take in nutrients. We are helping them by applying biofertilizers and symbiotic microbes, and are constant mulching with grasses in an attempt to control the invasive grass that grows around them.

The mushroom lab was intended to provide quick income while we learned the best way to make the rest of the land productive. However, with unpredictable rising temperatures, power cuts and environmental contamination it wasn’t easy. It took a year to get our first fruiting mushrooms. Now, three years into the project, we are successfully producing reishi and oyster mushrooms.

In 2022 we built a new lab in the colder region of San Lucas Sacatepéquez. Our sterile work is conducted there as well as fruiting profitable cold climate mushrooms such as grey oyster. Reishi is fruited at the farm and is used to make an immune boosting medicine.