The Lavender Project
The Lavender Project
Visit The Lavender Project’s Website
Picture vast fields of once rich farmland, parched by the sun and baked by seven years of drought. Clouds of dust billow behind each footstep as you walk. Nopal cacti are the only living organisms that seem happy and unaffected by the drought. Subsistence farmers are selling off their precious livestock- chickens, goats, and cattle because they lack feed for them. Most able bodied men have left to seek work in other parts of Mexico or the United States just to feed their families. Four of six irrigation pumps simply don’t work anymore, parts of their rusted casing lie like castaways in pieces on the brown earth. Even if the fields could be irrigated, the prices at which subsistence farmers could sell their staple crops: corn, beans, and peppers have plummeted in recent years due to the effects of NAFTA on the local economies.
It is 2005 in Central Mexico. The village is Rancho La Colorada outside of Dolores Hidalgo in the State of Guanajuato. The board of St. Anthony’s Alliance is visiting the village for the first time, trying to assess ways in which we can help this small village of 900 people living on one of the many enormous land grants or Ejidos given to peasants after the Mexican revolution.
Their situation seems desperate. Most of the villagers live in the World Health Organization’s definition of moderate poverty, less than $2 a day. With the majority of working men gone, only women, children and old men remain to try and farm the fields. The drought has deepened their deteriorating position. It is a village, like so many, in need of a reinvigorating local economy, a new direction, a way to provide for themselves and keep their families together.
Transformation is the word that comes to mind: A new way to support themselves, embracing a new direction while still preserving the best parts of their rural life and culture. It was in this climate that members of the St. Anthony’s board first researched the growing of Lavender as a new cash crop. Lavender? Lavender! In our search for a new crop, drought and pest resistant, long lived with a plentitude of value added products made from it we found that lavender was a natural choice. Lavender has been present in Mexico for centuries. Known as lavanda, or espliego, it has been used for home healing remedies over generations. A hardy herb in the same family of herbs as rosemary, it lives up to 12 years is drought resistant and pest resistant. Deer, grasshoppers and goats won’t eat it, a plus in an area where sheep, goats, and cattle graze freely. Best of all, even though you probably wouldn’t make your family’s tortillas from it, (although you could!) it has thousands of uses, from fragrance and aromatherapy used in candles, sachets and drawer liners to the prized oil used for soap, perfumes, and any imaginable line of body care products. It is the main ingredient in Herbs du Provence. Culinary artists use it for flavoring honey, ice cream, lemonade and even margaritas to name a few of its innovative uses. It is used to ward off headaches, mosquitoes and scorpions
Entire niche industries are springing up around the United States centered on lavender, following the example of the famous region of Provence in France. Farming and making products from lavender has transformed the town of Sequim, Washington, once a dying dairy farming economy into an example of successful “Agritourism” like that of the legendary California wine country. Sequim now hosts one of the largest 3-day lavender festivals in the United States. Blanco County, Texas has a similar story, growing from one farm, Hill Country Lavender into 8 or more farms and a countywide lavender festival featured each year as a destination by the Texas Department of Tourism.
Lavender seemed like the perfect value-added crop for this tiny village in Mexico except for a few minor details. No one had ever grown it, no one knew where we could purchase plants in Mexico in quantity and few farmers were left in the village to tend it should we be able to surmount the first two problems. Worst of all, there was no water.
The lack of water was our first and biggest obstacle. Even though lavender doesn’t need anything like the amount of water that other crops need, new rooting plants especially need a steady source of water. In the spring of 2006, St. Anthony’s Alliance entered into a 5-year collaborative agreement with a group of 8 farmers whose irrigation pump had been broken for several years. We would buy them a new pump and in exchange they would plant one hectare (about 2.2 acres) of lavender and also plant soybeans for the local soy kitchen school program. $15,000 dollars later and only a few short weeks and water was flowing again, in time for the farmers to plant their corn, beans, alfalfa and soybeans.
Our project was funded initially by a generous “seed” grant from Stephen Tryon of Overstock.com. In February 2006, St. Anthony’s Board member, Teresa Balcomb attended the 2nd Annual Southwest Lavender Conference in Fredericksburg, Texas with Maria Martinez, a representative from La Colorada. It was at this conference that Teresa met Al and Peggy Armstrong of Valley View Lavender Farm in Buhl, Idaho. They volunteered to host an intern farmer from the village and teach him the trade. With the help of Worldwide Farmers Exchange we were able to get a temporary J-1worker’s visa for Aucencio Domenzain to spend the summer working and learning all aspects of lavender production.
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Aucencio, a true self starter, returned from Idaho totally energized about the incredible possibilities lavender posited. With no formal training in business or computers he wrote a manual in Spanish about how to grow lavender and some of its uses. St. Anthony’s published his manual in booklet form. Armed with his booklet and his newfound knowledge and his own native farming and business sense, he wrote a grant for assistance in starting their small business enterprise to the Business Incubators program at The Universidad Technologica del Norte Guanajuato (UTNG). After working on the business plan under the guidance of Director Andres Casillas Barajas and his staff at the business program, Azul Lavanda was born. In August of 2007 the three-phase grant was accepted by the UTNG Business Incubators as one of the University’s exemplary projects! This means technical support in terms of designing logos, websites and all materials necessary to start a business, help with legal aspects, internet and office support and help locating local markets for products and suppliers. It was an amazing feat to pull all of this together in less than one year! To date Azul Lavanda has ratified its first “Constitution” and working bylaws outlining how all of the members interact and will reap the benefit of the new business. Graphic artists are helping with logo design. Attorneys have drawn up all the legal documents they will need to legally market their products and patent them if necessary.
The UTNG provides technical support but they are not a funding organization. For funding, Aucencio and Azul Lavanda have appealed to the Presidencia de Dolores Hidalgo, the equivalent of the city government of the local municipality. As we write, the Presidencia has agreed to a remarkable 80/20 funding of Azul Lavanda’s initial proposal for drip irrigation for the lavender, a warehouse in which to harvest and process the plants as well as a nursery to root foundling plants, and a distillation unit for extracting the valuable lavender oil.
St. Anthony’s has had a hand in all of this, thanks to the incredible generosity of our supporters. In November of 2006, Teresa Balcomb and Aucencio Domenzain struck a deal with the only nursery we could find that had lavender in quantity in the State of Puebla, Mexico. Most varieties of lavender are hybrids and grow only from cuttings not from seed. By March of the next year we had transplanted our first 500 cuttings of the Provence into 4 inch pots so they could triple in size. In May, with the help of 15 volunteers from North Texas State University, the villagers had their first lavender in the ground! More incredibly, the climate was perfect, just as we had suspected, and by July 2007 we had our first lavender harvest. For anyone who knows about growing lavender, plants normally take 2 years to root before they can typically be harvested for flowers or oil so a harvest our first year was a gift!
By May 2006 we received our second 500 plants of the Grosso variety, prized for its wonderful oil. Under the farmers expert care the tiny cuttings were ready for planting in the fall. Not one single plant has died. Moreover, given the remarkable growth of the plants the farmers have already begun their own nursery, rooting their own stock in order to triple the size of their fields by 2008. With any luck at all, not only will the village never have to purchase another lavender plant, they are now positioned to become Mexico’s leading supplier of the plants.
With such a meteoric pace the farmers were in desperate need of a workspace. In November of 2007 St. Anthony’s provided $3500 for the construction of the new Azul Lavanda Bodega, a small warehouse, built entirely by the local farmers. Luckily, the money from St. Anthony’s will be counted as Azul Lavanda’s 20% contribution in the 80/20 match from the Presidencia so that the local government can underwrite much of the rest of the funding for the entire project.
What is the future for our field of dreams? The farmers hope to have 5000 plants under cultivation within 2 years. If all goes well they can begin sale of nursery plants this summer for landscaping. Azul Lavanda should be able to begin producing its own organic lavender oil by summer of 2008. The farmers hope to be a source for fresh cut lavender flowers for local markets and dried lavender flowers and buds year round. Men, women, and children have learned to make lavender wands, sachets and wreaths for sale in local markets providing an immediate source of income when the flowers are in bloom. When sold at local markets, the flowers become their own exquisite advertising.
The future seems a bit brighter for this once parched village. With the potential for a new economy based on a sound, sustainable form of agriculture, women, who had no visible means of income, may now be able to make a living and men who heretofore often had to seek any kind of menial work in the United States may be able to remain at home as contributing members of their community. St Anthony’s, through your incredible generosity, has lent its green thumb to this process. In no small measure, the slow, but steady transformation of this village has been and will continue to be a self-sustaining field of dreams.
