Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
Shirt unbuttoned, Fernando Funes-Monzote leans back in a rocking chair under the shade of a wooden pavilion, pulls a cigar out of his front pocket, and fires it up as two farm dogs vie for his attention. The farmhands have just finished lunch, sitting facing the wall at a narrow wooden plank that serves as a dining table. They had just finished smoking the beehives with Funes—exhausting work under a burning midday Cuban sun—and the break was well earned.
"I had a very close relationship with nature in general in my childhood," Funes says between puffs of his sweetly smoked stogie. "We played games in between the grass and trees, hiding in the big fields. And my parents were researchers at an animal sciences institute, so I visited all over the country with them in all the provinces, where they met the people and learned the way of living and farming in the countryside."
Marigold lettuce can be used as a natural insect repellent, one of the many methods and techniques that's led to the rise of organic farming in Cuba.
Now the owner of his farm, Finca Marta, named after his deceased mother, Funes has been using the farming skills he's learned his whole life to give back to the Cuban people who taught him them in the first place. And he's paying them back in delicious organic produce, raised by traditional, sustainable Cuban methods, prepared in some of the best restaurants at the forefront of Havana's restaurant revolution.
"The idea is that every farm around here will keep its character, but that we are joining our common interests toward the market and social activities, to protect the environment and to impact the people who work here and who eat what we produce," Funes says.
At Finca Marta, farmer Fernando Funes turns old beer cans into makeshift pots for his seedlings.
In the U.S., growers and restaurateurs alike can tend to exaggerate toward grandiosity when describing the consequences of their decisions to go organic. In Cuba, men and women like Funes are literally saving their countrymen's lives. After the U.S.–Cuba's historically most important and geographically natural trading partner–imposed its embargo, Cuba sold its crops, especially sugar, to the Soviet Union for guaranteed prices. In return, they got vast quantities of staples like rice, wheat, vegetable oil, and the gasoline and petroleum products needed to run both the industry and agriculture that sustained the nation. But when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989 that trade agreement disappeared as well. The result? Cuba's so-called Special Period, where the entire country teetered on the edge of famine.
"It was a very important moment of decision for the Cuban food system," Funes says. At the time, he was studying agriculture at university, and the consequences of Cuba's dependence on Soviet subsidies and factory-farming techniques were obvious. "We were seeing around us right at the university how the Holstein cows were dying because of a lack of food. They depended on the hundreds of thousands of tons of feed concentrates and chemical resources that had come from the Soviet Union and socialist countries, and now they couldn't survive the natural Cuban environment."
Once they're picked, crops at Finca Marta like these tomatoes go into a basket before distribution. They're picked by hand, not gas-guzzling machines.
Funes learned two things from that period: the importance of rediscovering traditional, organic methods that worked naturally with the Cuban landscape, and that when you want to organize university students around a grand concept, you have to keep them happy. "We were all young, and when you party, you get into a really good mood. And that's the key to organizing students: partying and keeping people as calm as possible," Funes chuckles.
Today, Finca Marta is the result of the organic-farming work he's done for the last quarter century. The farms grow 25 different crops, from avocados to tubers, using organic and other sustainable methods throughout. A rain catchment on the roof collects 300,000 liters of water a year to get the escarole, dill, basil, mint, parsley, and other greens through the dry season. The fertilizer is all-natural–the barns even include a built-in sluice that channels droppings from the farm's cows and horses into a pit where its methane and growth encouraging matter can be collected. Though the farm has a tractor, Funes, and his workers prefer to yoke the four oxen on hand to till the soil and transport goods to the trucks that haul Finca Marta's veggies to the hottest eateries in Havana. "Sure, the tractor does the work of a ten-oxen team, and one ox can do the work of ten men, but with a small farm like ours, we prefer to work with the oxen," Funes says. "Oxen can work in the wet soil, and our people know how to work with oxen. The tractor gets stuck in the mud, and needs gasoline."
Farmers like to depend on ox-driven carts for transporting their many goods to local Cuban eateries.
For other transport needs, the farm uses horse-drawn carriages–it has three horses that can run free on a large tract of land looked over by a single tall palm. And the Holstein cows that suffered under the Special Period? Finca Marta uses Jersey cows. "They're smaller, and produce less milk, but are more stable in their production, and are more resistant, more adaptable, to the condition of our tropical grasses," Funes says.
To keep the pests at bay, the farm subscribes to the theory that by keeping a wide variety of crops in amounts that aren't excessive, invasive insects are less attracted to the farm as a whole. And it's a great way of avoiding a monoculture–one lesson learned from the downfall of the sugar-obsessed Cuban economy of old. The farm, after all, gets plenty of sweetness from its apiaries, using a local breed of Cuban honeybee that is stingless.
It's a win-win all around, Funes says: The farm is more self-sustainable than the factory farms of the pre-1990s, the environment is the better for it, and the Cuban people can eat without relying solely on foreign handouts. And to cap it all off? The relationship with the restaurateurs and people who go out to eat the food grown at Finca Marta is stronger than ever. "People like what we produce, our produce is popular in the restaurants, and the restaurants wait for our products," Funes says. "We feel good about that."