During your last trip to the grocery store, you might have seen a Belizean made coconut oil on the shelf, and local fruit juices in the fridge, all bearing the Silk Grass Farms logo.
SGF is a four year old enterprise but it's not your run-of-the-mill farm. While most farmers are clearing their trees on their land to produce a couple vegetables to sell to the market, SGF has bigger plans than that.
But for now, what sets them aside is their cold pressed coconut oil and their refreshing philosophy of farming around the wild grass and bushes, instead of getting rid of them.
Courtney Menzies went south today to take a tour of their farm and factory. Here is part one of that story.
Courtney Menzies:
Nestled in the southern village of Silk Grass is a 27,000 acre farm, producing Belizean made coconut products and pure fruit juices. But Silk Grass Farms isn't your normal clear-the-land, burn-the-bushes farm. Rather, they've decided to work with the nature that was already there instead of against it.
And out of all that land, only about 3,000 acres are being used to farm - since that's what was used by the previous owner. Executive Director of SGF, Dr Henry Canton, and the co-founder, Mandy Cabot, have committed to preserving the other 24,000 as a part of the Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve.
Dr Canton explained that the views he held as a farmer for 36 years changed the moment he learned about regenerative farming.
Dr Henry Canton, Executive Director, SGF
"I think that once you start getting into it and understanding the principles and the concepts of having the tools at hand, being able to use them and make them become beneficial to you as opposed to seeing them as detrimental to you then your whole philosophy changes."
Mandy Cabot, Co-Founder/Dir., SGF
"We saw frankly with a little bit of horror, the decades of extraction economics, the take, make waste, linear model of taking stuff, making stuff, leaving some waste, feeling it and taking the proceeds off shore and that made absolutely no sense."
"Our motto is about up Belize, by Belize, for Belize, it's a circular economic model, that mean don't take from the soil, put back into the soil. You use regenerative renewable energy sources, put back where you can, and lay the groundwork for future generations."
And from that 3,000 acres, SGF's team has planted a diversity of crops. Their oranges, watermelons, and pineapples are currently being used to produce their juices, which contain no additives.
But it's their cold pressed coconut products that make up the bulk of their work.
Dr Henry Canton, Executive Director, SGF
"The way I think we have the factory lined out, cold pressed oil, the actual coconut oil, or I should probably say all things coconut once I think we're up and going with all the things we need outside of cold pressed because I did mention to you that oil is only one of the products tat we can have or we're hoping to have three different forms of milk, a 3%, a 3% fat, a 16% fat and a 24% fat which will be culinary milk and cream, we're also hoping to turn the trash into flour and stuff like that. I'm suspecting that that component of our business, the coconut component of our business, will be somewhere between 35 and 40, 45% of our whole business at the end of the day."
And Dr Canton explained that why cold pressed coconut oil is better than the regular ones you find in the stores:
Dr Henry Canton, Executive Director, SGF
"If you pick up a lot of the food magazines and the trends of food and where food is going to go, a lot of it is trending away from heat and from denaturing that heat does. It's the same thing that a lot of people are moving away from frozen because of the denaturing product that freezing does. Cold press is the way that you can get the most natural form of coconut oil because all you're using is a mechanical way of removing a particular matter and water."
SGF is also home to a diversity of other produce such as cassava, dragon fruit, passion fruit, mangoes, cacao, vanilla, and more, which they plan to use to create even more value added products.
And tomorrow we'll have part two, where we'll take you even more in depth at how the fruits get from farm to fridge.
