Couple Successfully Grows Cacao And Makes Products Without Owning A Farm Or A Factory
Agriculture|November 2019
MANY PEOPLE wish that they could pack up, move out of the city, and live on a farm. Husband and wife Kenneth and Shirley Reyes-Lao, 36 and 33 respectively, did just that.
Yvette Tan
Couple Successfully Grows Cacao And Makes Products Without Owning A Farm Or A Factory
In 2016, they left their jobs in the Information Technology (IT) industry and moved to Davao to start Cacao Culture Farms. “We were searching for something that we wanted to do and agriculture was something that was always in the periphery,” Ken says. “People say that when they retire, they’ll run a farm. That’s when we decided, why wait until retirement age to go into agriculture?”

They scouted provinces to move to, and decided on Davao when a local representative from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) pointed them to a five-day seminar on cacao. Ken, who attended the seminar, would later tell Sheila, “We can grow our own cacao and make our own chocolates, and the worst thing that can happen if our business doesn’t fly is that we eat a lot of chocolate.”

Another reason they chose Davao is because they valued “personal security, city comfort, and access to agriculture.” “It was a balance of city comforts and access to agriculture. Second was safety. If we were to move somewhere where we didn’t know anyone, at least there was the infrastructure for 911, hospitals, stuff like that,” Ken says. “And when we moved there, we also didn’t know how it would turn out so Sheila had to keep working. At least there’s an IT industry there where we could use our past experience and skills to tide us over in terms of income.”

FARMING ON RENTED LAND

They initially wanted to buy farmland, but after former Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte became the President of the Philippines in 2016, land prices went up, and it was out of their budget. But that didn’t stop them from establishing a cacao farm. “We were surprised, coming from Manila, it was very cheap to rent land, especially agricultural land,” Ken says.

This story is from the November 2019 edition of Agriculture.

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This story is from the November 2019 edition of Agriculture.

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