The first day that we arrived in Piura, we had the opportunity to meet with the farmers association. Nobody else spoke a word of English, other than my current contact. My Spanish is poor at best. I did my best to introduce myself to the group. Next, they went around and introduced themselves. Only one of the board members was a farmer. He introduced himself and told me he had a cacao farm.  I tried to speak a bit with him and ask about his farm. He immediately invited me to visit him on his farm. Well, how often does a cacao farmer in Peru invite you to visit his farm? So, I responded "Yes, of course!". I asked where his farm was. It turned out it was a two hour drive away. He seemed surprised that I was so quick to respond, but the decision was made. We would go the following day. At this point, the plot get's a bit thicker. Yes, it turned out that the town he lived by was a two hour bus ride away, however he was an additional one hour car ride away from there in the mountains at about 3,000 feet. He seemed concerned that I spoke almost no Spanish and he no English, but I assured him that all would be fine.  We would leave the next morning early, arrive and look at the farm, stay the night at his house, and then return the following day. He didn't seem to  believe we were coming. He looked at my face as if he were trying to see if I was just saying yes only to not arrive. He was heading to buy the tickets that day, but wanted to be sure.  I assured him that there was no problem, that would be there at 8. We shook hands as I left the building. The following morning, we arrived at the bus station at 8. Don Francisco was there and our contact was helping to translate a bit. Don Francisco was now wondering if it would be alright if we needed to stay another day. It turned out the one hour drive from the town was through torturous back roads that were impassable if it happened to rain. We might have to stay the night in town and get the the farm the following day. At the thought of being an hour car ride into the mountains unable to return in case of rain, my sense of  reason kicked in a bit. Fortunately, I am adept at suppressing such reasoning. The bus ride went off without a hitch. We arrived in town and promptly found a car to give us a ride into the mountains. After a harrowing hour and a half of driving, we arrived at Don Francisco's house. A house with mud walls and floor, with two bedrooms, a kitchen with a cuy(guinea pig) pen adjoined by a small portal on the base of the wall, and a porch with two fermentation boxes right out front. We headed right out to the farm, which is watered by a large mountain stream. Francisco's farm was a dense jungle of cacao. Many trees are over 40 years old. Most of them were not pruned or weeded, but remarkably productive despite this. This is especially surprising, because cacao does not generally do well at all at altitude. Yet, here we were in the foothills of the Andes by the Ecuadorian border looking at these beautiful old cacao trees. We met Francisco's wife out in the farm, who was working with their son and a farmhand to prepare seedlings to expand their cacao production. After an exhausting 2 hour journey through his farm, we headed back to the house. The rest of the evening we spent with Francisco and his family. We had dinner with them. We talked about the U.S. a bit. But mostly, we talked about cacao. Because of the prices that the cacao of this area are beginning to command, cacao is one of their most profitable crops. I cannot express how important this is in the development of sustainability in fine cacao. Francisco, among other farmers is growing cacao, not because he has to, but because he wants to grow it and sees a future in it. This is just not the case in many other countries. At one point, he asked me how much cacao I had bought in the last year from Piura. When I told him, he was pretty severely dismayed. It is a remarkable challenge to balance the priorities of improving the quality of life of farmers with producing fine chocolate at such a small scale. At Rogue Chocolatier, we are constantly thinking about how to balance the two. Unfortunately, the world is a complicated place where there are rarely easy fixes for these problems. As we continue to grow, one of our main goals is to positively affect the quality of life for farmers, but also the quality of their work. We fired up a gas generator for light that night. We sat with Francisco as he looked through a new calender he had received with pictures of farmers from other parts or Peru. I think what we saw was genuine pride that he was in the company of those he saw in the pictures. Time moves even slower in the country, but eventually we made it to sleep. The next morning, we awoke to the various sounds that one does on a farm in the countryside: Burros with their ear piercing baying, roosters' with their incessant pronouncements, pigs fighting over their morning meals, and birds from the jungle nearby. We had breakfast and then went back out on the farm. Everyone sat down up on the hill. Francisco's wife began milking the cows for cheese that she makes and sells to the neighbors, Francisco cropped a stalk of sugar cane and began whittling off pieces and handing them to us, then, after a while, we headed back up to another part of the farm to see more trees. Francisco kept pointing out that it was important for farmers like himself to know producers like us and for us to visit them. He told me that we were welcome anytime, that we had a second home with him. I hope to evaluate a bunch of samples of cacao from different parts of Piura after I return, but the one I am most excited to try is that from Don Francisco's farm in the mountains.[gallery link="file" columns="2"]