9 course breakfast followed by coffee

Eggs and toast....and yoghurt, fruit, soup, suated trout, sashimi with mango wasabi, lulo caramel crumble cakes and more.... I joined Alison and Kevin for the most epic breaking of the fast in memory. Joseph is an amazing and eccentric artist and chef who does this crazy nine course breakfast for guests at his place here in Salento. Being a wannabie foodie myself Alison and I shared nine courses while Kevin helped cook. I snapped pictures the whole time having promised Joseph to write a pleasing review with photographs online for him. By the time the lulo caramel cake came around I needed a nap.

....but instead, I pulled Kevin along with me to check out a local coffee farm in the area. I asked around and found a farmer willing to show us his finca and so we jumped in the back of one of the old land rovers that serve as taxis in these parts. Wandering through the palm fronds and wet bushes of a coffee farm made me giddy and nostalgic for other coffee lands I've visited. After all, how to integrate conservation with coffee farming is what I wrote my thesis on in Jamaica. Here in Colombia the farms seem to be more shade grown and integrated with other crops. This one was small and only a few acres but highly intensified.

If you didn't know any better you might even think it was a forest. Your eye traveling upward from the ground imagine low growing herbs and flowers planted as natural insecticides under a dense green layer of arabica coffee bushes man height blanketing the hillsides. Over top of this green mat banana fronds poke out like bristly hairs and are shaded only by the branches of dense avocado and fruit trees dancing to the movement of small birds in their boughs.

By being planned structurally similar to a natural forest, being shaded, and keeping a diversity of wild and natural crops growing together organically this farm both produces food and serves as a refuge for many creatures too. This integration of agriculture with creative ways to conserve habitat has great potential for stemming off the extinction of many species worldwide. This is especially true in the tropical belt of the world where the greatest biological diversity exists and small subsistence farms dot the landscape. Recently my advisors from graduate school at the University of Michigan wrote a new book synthesizing these ideas. If you have the slightest curiousity check out their book, Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty. And on a dorky side note I am even included in the acknowledgements :) I just thought that was cool. I've never been in a books acknowledgements before!

Anyways, it was a gorgeous little farm and after showing us around the farmer even demonstrated the process by which he drieds his coffee, told us how the local farmer cooperative buy-in works, and then ground up and shared a homemade cup of his brew right there with us. I translated for Kevin along the way and was geeking out on agroecology the whole time. Being an urban Chicago boy on a tropical farm it all seemed pretty new to K and I think he was a bit overwhelmed in a good way. As for me I was like a kid in a candy store!

Standing on the bumper of the jeep taxi stuffed 8 deep with local children we were like dogs grinning with their heads out the windows climbing up over the bumpy roads through the green hills. Along the way I was pointing out birds; flycatchers on fence wires, turqouise colored motmots, and the agile shapes of swifts dancing over the fields. Fresh cool air and green misty mountainsides in the heart of the coffee lands.