Hello and good day!
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For our business to be a long-term success, we needed a sustainable way to convince farmers to replant pure Nacional cacao.
If the trend toward pulling up the native cacao variety in favor of industrial hybrids were to continue, our progress would cease just two or three years downstream.
Noé Vasquez came up with a brilliant solution.
Although our funding was limited—we were still scraping by with funds borrowed from friends and family—Noé and Brian started a clone nursery.
It isn’t easy to think long term when you’re running out of money, but Brian and Noé summoned the grit to do just that.
Noé believed it would be a tremendous boon for the community to clone the tree on Fortunato’s farm that tested as the purest expression on record of pure Nacional.
Brian agreed, and Don Fortunato agreed to go along with the project.
There are two ways to grow a new cacao tree in a nursery.
You can plant a cacao seed, or you can make a clone.
If you plant a cacao seed, it will grow up out of the soil fully formed and start producing usable fruit in two to seven years.
In the case of pure Nacional cacao in the district of Huarango, the average time is two to three years before a tree produces usable fruit.
Industrial hybrids in Africa can take seven years.
It depends on the quality of the soil and how well the fruit is adapted to the environment.
When you plant a seed, the new tree will be a child of the tree the seed came from and the tree responsible for pollination.
It will be a unique offspring of two individual trees.
If you clone a cacao tree, you take a branch off the tree you want to clone, and you graft the branch onto a root stock.
In the case of this new clone nursery, Noé found two benefits that led him to favor cloning.
The most obvious reason was that we would get identical twins of the purest pure Nacional cacao tree ever tested.
Every single clone would be an exact genetic match with the characteristics that Noé found so bewitching in the original mother tree.
Another big benefit is that a clone would allow us to choose good root stock.
Trees are very peculiar when it comes to grafting.
It is bizarre to think about, but when you graft a clone branch onto a root stock, the genetics above and below the graft remain distinct forever.
The roots can have one set of genetics, and the tree above the graft will have a different set.
Noé saw this as a tremendous opportunity.
In the past, he had bred trees to have excellent root stocks.
He already had a collection of these trees, and he could grow more.
These root stocks were very efficient at absorbing water and nutrients from the ground to nourish the fruit on the trees.
By pairing high-quality root stocks with the genetic offspring of the Fortunato mother tree, we would have the best of all worlds.
It would be highly productive like an industrial hybrid because of the roots.
It would be fine flavored and genetically pure because of the clone above the graft.
Because the tree would be well adapted to the environment, essentially as perfectly adapted as any cacao tree could be, it would be symbiotic with the jungle, not competitive.
It would be naturally disease resistant.
It was a thing of genius.
If cacao farmers wanted to come into our project, all they had to do was go to Noé’s farm and take away mother tree clones to plant on their farm.
We subsidized the nursery and gave the clones away for free.
The program wouldn’t lead to any production increases for two to three years, but that was fine by us.
We weren’t going anywhere.
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Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day.
Adam
Click here for wonderful chocolate made with pure Nacional cacao.
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