Bean to bar

Geeta Peters is a cocoa farmer who is fed up of earning less than every one else in the cocoa industry.

Business Day first met Geeta during a tour of the Cocoa Research Centre’s International Cocoa Genebank in Centeno on June 14, 2019.

That was the final day of the introductory chocolate making course at the centre. For five days, the students were taken through the process of chocolate making from bean to bar. The last part of the course was touring the historic cocoa genebank, which houses hundreds of different varieties of cocoa trees from around the world.

Geeta says farmers still get the lowest payments in the chocolate-making industry.

“(Farmers do) all the hard work in cocoa – plant it, reap, harvest, ferment, and do everything and when it's time to sell it sometimes the farmers lose out. They get the raw end of the bargain,” she said.

To counter this, she took part in the course to learn how to make chocolates.

“If you see we have products, we sell our cocoa and people producing it. Why don’t we produce?”

Put her in an office and she will go insane, she told Business Day on the drive over to the genebank. She grew up on a cocoa estate in Mamoral, and now lives on another one with her husband. She cannot imagine another way of life.

“My father was a farmer so I born and grow knowing about cocoa. I know from planting, pruning, reaping, fermenting and sales. Then I got married. My husband is Leroy Peters. He had some cocoa trees and I told him how to care for the trees to increase production."

Leroy took his wife’s advice and they began pruning the trees and caring for them to her specifications. This led to a better cocoa yield.

However, heavy rainfall in 2016 led to the destruction of some of the trees on the Peters’ estate. Two days after the storm, Geeta and Leroy went to work replanting their estate.

“Cocoa is hard work, but with the passion and love of agriculture and cocoa, we continue to work the estate,” she said.

With arduous labour and dedication, the Peters’ estate started to bloom with fine flavoured Trinitario beans again. Two years later, they entered the National Cocoa Awards.

Of the 32 farmers who entered, five cocoa farmers remained in the running. As they sat in the Southern Academy for the Performing Arts (SAPA), San Fernando, Geeta and her husband were not expecting to win anything, but then Leroy's name was called as the first place winner for the John Spence Challenge Trophy. The couple was stunned.

“It went from disaster to the number one farmer. It takes hard work, devotion and put God first, but we reaped, harvested and won.”

The Peters' secret to optimising yield on a cocoa crop is to harvest the cocoa on time.

“That makes us reap more than we may lose. It all depends on weather conditions. During the rainy season we lost more. Fortunately, all now we have a very high yield.”

Soil quality, Geeta said, was another factor in producing a high yield in cocoa pods.

Labour on the Peters estate is a family activity as she, her husband and her son are the only people working on the field. They need five or six more people to work on their estate. Asked if they would be willing to hire Venezuelan labour, she said, "If they can do the job that's no problem."

Geeta is a third generation cocoa farmer. Both her father and grandfather were cocoa farmers, and Leroy’s grandfather was a cocoa farmer. But this intergenerational knowledge of the cocoa industry did not help with them improving on their sales.

The Peters estate uses agents to sell their beans. However, the agents are also finding it difficult to sell the beans.

“Right now there is a shortage for the agent. They cannot get their beans sold because of the quality. Bean buyers prefer beans from other countries, and claim they have better beans than Trinidad." But Geeta is adamant that cannot be true.

“We know we have the best beans. We know we have the fine flavoured beans, best tasting, best everything.”

Luckily, the award in December 2018 has given the Peters estate a boost in business.

“My husband had a very good bean profile. Right now we have plenty buyers. That’s the advantage. We also try to keep that number one in standard.”

The Peters are in the process of getting the necessary machinery to manufacture the chocolate. Then they will execute their plan to have a full bean to bar chocolate production operation.