Class XI, Seminar 11, Ecuador – Day 3

Posted on April 1, 2022

Holy Guacamole, a sweet day!

Today we visited the Finca Uyama Avocado farm, just 19 miles from the Colombian border as the Condor flies. Finca Uyama is an organic farm, established in 2007. It is the largest avocado farm in Ecuador, consisting of 180 hectors of land and is a family owned run by a father and daughter. There are no seasons like we have in the US, so they are able to harvest and produce oil year round. Annual rainfall is 600ml/year, avocado needs 1,500ml so they use an irrigation system. Avocado trees do not self pollinate, so they have 40 bee hives on site to pollinate the trees. It takes 9 months for the tree to grow from a seed to be ready to plant in the field. It then takes about 4 years to produce a fuerte, 2 years to produce a Haas. Fuerte avocados are larger and smoother, Haas are smaller and thicker skinned. When the avocados are ready to be picked off the trees they will lose their shininess. Here the family prepared a wonderful lunch for us and we were able to sample and purchase a number of their avocado oil products.

We also visited the Tababuela Sugar cane farm/mill. This farm is 3000 hectors in size and is the only sugar mill in northern Ecuador. Due to the higher altitude, this sugar cane takes 18 months to mature (compared to 12 months along the coastline) and is harvested manually. It is a male dominated workforce, only one employee out or 300 is female and works in the harvesting and planting process. 50 or so employees work the fields. They have two main bugs that can cause damage to their stalks, similar to our insects with cornstalks in MN. When the sugar is ready to be harvested, they will first stop the irrigation for 30 days. Then, they will burn off the leaves then proceed with chopping the plants down by hand bringing in 1.25 metric tons of yield per hector.