Up this morning for breakfast at the hotel. On the bus at 7:45 and off to tour the countryside.
The big reason for Elna and I going on this tour was that we were going to tour an asparagus farm and today was our lucky day.
After a few hours of driving we finally got to the farm. The farm is surrounded by a tall wall and a thorny hedge row to keep people out. After waiting at the gate for a short while, a vehicle escort lead us through the fields up to the owners residence.
The owner pictured with us above was the former Minister of Agriculture of Peru. He was very well spoken with very good English, which is much better than getting the interpreter's version of the question or answer.
The owners met us as we arrived and were very cordial and invited us in to their yard by the pool which sits just outside a large and very nice home. They offered us cool Peruvian drinks and appetisers. The owner then spoke about his farm. He soon figured out that we were asparagus growers from Canada and was very forthcoming with information of how they produce their asparagus.
We did ask him a lot of questions and received a lot of answers. Some of the interesting facts were that they harvest 3 times in 2 years, the wages they pay their staff are $8.00 to $10.00 for a long day of work.
They do air freight some asparagus to Los Angeles, but because of the cost they usually ship by boat. He was quite pleased with the fact that he could get his product from the packing plant to Los Angeles in 13 to 14 days. After that it is trucked to the final destination even if it is Calgary Alberta. Certainly different than on our farm, if our product is 3 days old we are panicking and making it into pickles, soup or some other way of preserving the crop.
The climate in Peru is quite warm, but it hardly ever rains so all the water, fertilizer, and even pesticides are fed to the plant through the irrigation. The other thing is they have warm nights which allows the asparagus to grow all night where ours stops growing in the cool nights and instead forms sugars in the plants, hence a sweeter product.
During our stay in Peru we did have asparagus at several of our meals (even asparagus pizza), but maybe we are biased but we felt ours was much superior.
We did learn a lot, now we know why ours is better.
This farm among other crops produces table grapes. There was a crew doing a final picking or cleanup of the vineyard and we did get a chance to pick and eat fresh table grapes and I have to admit they were better than the ones transported to Canada from Peru.
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