I want to take you next on our favorite adventure in Bohol - finding a cacao farm! I wanted to add another farm to my list and decided on visiting the Lasang Chocolate Farm in Maribojoc! I came to Bohol after all in search of different forms of chocolates from the Chocolate Hills to the Chocolate Chamber and now the actual thing from the source ;) We are so glad we booked this private tour, which included a mini cacao introduction walking tour, cacao picking and tree planting. I will share the chocolate making in the next post so that I can post more pictures.
We rented a car for the day and drove around an hour to get here from Panglao. The roads were paved well and our Toyota Vios was good enough to get there.
We followed Google maps and turned left at this sign.
A small 4x4 would be nicer from this short road to the farm.
We turned left again on this sign and glad we booked in advance through their Lasang Facebook page. They told me this day was reserved for just the two of us. Hehe.
There was parking space and we found the owners Nanay Nene and Tatay Ernesto Macabenta already waiting for us for our 10am tour =)
Ah, this place reminded me of our organic tours with the Agricultural Training Institute of the Department of Agriculture... I breathed in some fresh air and looked forward to an exciting day.
I deliberately left this day empty so that we can fully immerse in this experience. The first thing they welcomed us with was the best unique drink ever - a refreshing ice cold cacao juice! This was paired with dried mangoes covered in dark chocolate. Only in these kind of agri tours was I able to experience special treats and foodie experiments made especially by the owners fresh from their local produce.
Tatay Ernie quickly took the helm of the tour and proudly showed us his cacao collection to start our tour! He is an agricultural engineer if I'm not mistaken, while his wife is a former professor so they both gave us such a wealth of information about their passion projects Lasang Farm and Balai Cacao. I hope I got the infos right below haha. ✌
I have never seen so much cacao pods in one tree! And his technique is interesting - pruning up to 20% only, as well as keeping the leaves on top and the pods at the bottom at eye level. He also doesn't cover his pods!
We harvested one variety that is reddish-yellow and about 70% ripe. When cutting the fruit, one should not twist the fruit, he said.
He has more than a thousand cacao trees in his farm and it takes around 3 years to be fruit bearing!
It is said that it takes 100 flower buds to produce 1 pod. And we saw so many in one tree.. It takes 45 days to flower then they spray his own concoction (I believe it's sili, panyawan and soap) as fertilizer on the 60th day.
He removes these kinds of pods
and what he calls chupon from the tree to maintain the health of his cacaos.
Things to watch out for include pod rot, over rain and no sunlight.
There are also cacao pod borers and they put these yellow insect sticky traps around the farm.
We didn't have to go very far to get another variety to harvest and try. He showed us the Criollo, Trinitario, UB19, BR25... I wished I had noted more stuff down.
My mind was wandering off with his cacao yield - the crazy amount of pods when we walked. And his trees bear fruit all year round (we were there February)! I couldn't tell the difference except for the UB19 which turns green to yellow haha.
I was very grateful that the couple was generous enough to share this with the public. I hope he gets a Farmer Scientist (Magsasaka Siyentista) award in the future for his contributions to other farmers, his methods and sharing his best practices. He must be doing something right with that much produce!
It was Jeff's turn to harvest a smaller ripe RB25 variety.
They had so much land left and this field of green is actually their edible garden patch. And so, you know, where lunch will be from (which is also included in the tour) - farm fresh to table prepared by Nanay Nene!
For appetizer, we had a go at their makeshift cacao pod slicer/opener, cleverly designed to be simple and not damage the prize within. It was hard for me (although I really worked hard on it haha) and easy for Jeff 😅
The cacao musilage is the white sticky substance that coats the cocoa beans. It tasted like the juice we had earlier (sweet and a little sour) and I chewed on so many without breaking the bean! Yummy! It was sooo good...
Most of the pod weight is from the shell. And since this is not fully ripe, the white part was still plenty hehehe.
I could eat this the whole day... Jeff liked the criollo one better while I liked the BR25 (probably because it tasted sweeter than sour)!
Here's a cross section of the beans - pretty purple and white. Tatay said this is how to tell the criollo variety and around how many percent criollo it is.
There are around a hundred pods worth of beans in this styrofoam box with holes here to ferment them into chocolate! He monitors the temperature regularly (40 degrees celcius and up) to make sure they are fermenting right. They get the cacao juice here too and cacao vinegar as by-products! But you only have such a limited time to get the juice before it turns into vinegar! I wish I could have that juice again but I can probably only do so in a farm haha.
We headed to the next activity - cacao tree planting! I wanted to contribute somehow and cement this moment for the future so I added this.
Lasang Farm has been doing this with guests for a few years now that they already cleared another area to plant more trees. It looked like a cemetery while we were walking past 😆
But in truth, we are creating new life and they willingly volunteer to be the guardians to nurse them to life until we return. We headed downhill to the cleared field.
I wanted to document this and come back after three years. They said they can also give us updates via Facebook from time to time so that we know how it's been growing.
The seedlings were given to them by the government. I believe it's the BR25 Trinitario variety that I liked! Tatay was telling me about grafting the cacao and I got confused about the scion and root stock and which one will grow (too technical so you better ask him yourself if you're interested and do a demo) hahaha. I think he added carbonized rice hull and vermicast to the beds before we planted.
My tree is just next to Jeff's 😊 Tatay said that you can follow a 3x3 or 2.35x2.75 (or 4x4 if under a coconut tree) setup for the spacing of cacao trees.
If newly planted into the ground, the area has to be 75% shaded then exposed to 75% sunlight once they are fruit bearing. And you're only supposed to prune 20% of the leaves at a time for mature ones. I hope I can read back on these info once I have a farm set up and visit Lasang Farm again for their other workshops.
You should know that it takes around 3 kg of white cacao beans to produce 1 kg of cocoa! So after three years, we hope to see our cacao babies again at the Lasang Farm in Bohol 💪😎
