Tag: Finca Marta Cuba

In early January 2020, I was part of the Organic Growers School Agroecology Tour of Cuba. I have already posted about a couple of the places we visited. Click the category Cuban Agriculture. Here I will tell you about Finca Marta in Artemisa.

After breakfast at the casa particulare where we stayed, we gathered at 9 am to ride our bus to Finca Marta, a wonderful agroecological farm.

Fernandito Funes Monzote provided a talk on agroecology  in Cuba and a tour of the farm. Finca Marta is a very tidy, productive, well-organized, sustainable, beautiful farm. The terraced stone-edged vegetable beds grew many kinds of lettuce, kale, mustards, arugula, mizuna. [I wonder why callaloo isn’t grown in Cuba, as it is in Jamaica].

Finca Marta has 720 hives of Italian/Spanish honeybees, which produce 10 tons of honey each year. Because there is no cold weather, bees fly all year, and they are not troubled by Colony Collapse Disorder. Also no Varroa mites, or tracheal mites. Their hives spend several months at the coast, gathering mangrove nectar. They spend several months in the mountains, gathering nectar from a kind of morning glory, then the winter on the home farm. We were encouraged to gear up and look in the hives they were inspecting, and observe the honey house and the van they use [as a mobile workshop?]

Finca Marta has a stone barn for two mares, 4 cows and geese. The livestock are closed in every evening. In the morning, the barn is washed down, and the manure goes out a drain into a temporary holding pond. After stirring the manure, a gate is opened, letting it into a closed tank. The resulting methane is piped into the kitchen as a cooking fuel, and the slurry continues to settling tanks, later becoming fertilizer for the gardens.

They have greenhouses and hoophouses covered with shadecloth or insect netting, not clear plastic. One is for seedlings in 13 x 20 Speedling-type plug flats. Others were growing tomatoes and cucumbers.

Mostly greens are being grown in the outdoor beds (it was winter when we were there). They sell to restaurants. They have some drip irrigation, but also spend 2.5 hours each day hand-watering. They also grow cassava and taro.

We had lunch at the farm, at our own expense. 20 CUC. 1 CUC=$1 US.

The centerpiece was a leg of pork which had been roasting in an earth oven since 8 pm the day before. There were many vegetables grown on the farm, fruit juice, wine and beer. This was a particularly good meal.

After lunch we worked for a short time on a service project. We harvested hibiscus flowers (aka Roselle, Jamaica, Sorrel) from pruned off branches. These get dried and sold for tea (think Red Zinger).

A question by a reader prompted me to look on the web, where I found a slideshow in English. If you can read Spanish, there is more info online.

Click to access Finca%20Marta.pdf

And a video

For more on Finca Marta, see Agriculture for Life by Fernando Funes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUx4EUCKo50