Skilled Konparet Bakers

Rosnie, Marie Maude, and other women on our nursery team are becoming experts in baking breadfruit konparet. We were able to put 60% breadfruit flour / 40% wheat flour in the recipe today, giving the konparet balanced and super-packed health benefits.

We’re making enough konparets to distribute to 15 schools in June. As you can see below, baking konparets has become easier for our team, but they need more tables because konparets should be spread out to dry more quickly and evenly. A $100 donation would allow our team to purchase a table and expand their work. Please use the button below to donate, and send an email to info@thehaititreeproject.org to let us know your donation is focused on the konparet table. Thank you!

10,000 Trees Need Bags

Help us fill these bags! While we have enough steady income from donors now to support a few workers, we still don’t have enough to purchase valuable seeds for all these bags. Many are filled with sed trees and Rosnie has put cashew in some as well, but we need more donations to buy mango seeds and many other more expensive seasonal fruits. If we don’t get more support soon, we will have to only produce a few hardwood trees for the fall. Spread the word about the work we are doing!

Rosnie and Konparet

Rosnie is measuring the weight of konparet bread for customers. It’s a complicated process. She needs to figure out how much each bread will weigh, how much to sell them for, and how much the materials will cost.

Will they end up making a profit? Well, for now, Trees That Feed is generously allowing us to make these baked goods and give them to schools along with information on the importance of konparet. Then once the area is familiar with the importance of breadfruit flour in foods, we hope it’ll increase interest, allowing the business to take off.

Making Konparets In La Sikri

Rosnie and Marie Maude are back from their training and making valuable breadfruit pastries at our nursery home in La Sikri. This is a major milestone for our work, and now people from surrounding locales are pouring in to taste our konparet. So far, no one has gone home disappointed.

One of our missions is always to inform, so we're making sure the nutritional value is shared. This week we are experimenting with pricing materials per konparet. Next week, we’ll present the konparet in schools and share the importance of breadfruit and other nutritious foods.

Komparet Training

Marie Maude and Rosnie went back to Jeremie for a seminar on making komparet (breadfruit). Recipes aren’t enough to make the perfect komparet. Witnessing the process is essential to learning how to make a good komparet, and being able to visit the factory will make them master komparet makers in no time.

LaSikri's New Reality: A Growing Economy

Thanks to the hard work of our team in Haiti and global donors, agroforestry has created a growing economy in LaSikri. Our smaller depo, large nursery, mill, solar electricity unit, and new hanging scale have slowly brought more attention to our growing project.

It's starting to look like a shop! We have breadfruit flour for sale at $1.50/lb, and people can grind their produce in our mill or charge their phones. While Rosnie works, she sets up a section to sell sandals for her own business.

What's next? Most likely, we'll be selling homemade chocolate from the ground cacao.

New Watertank

The water pipe is fixed and the villages are getting water again. However, the water is at trickle during the day and our Nursery Manager Enel has been getting up several times in the middle of the night when it flows well, to change the water pipe and fill the different drums.

Enel needs to get enough rest, so thanks to some donations we were able to purchase a storage tank. The tank will serve the 10,000 seedlings in our nursery well, and at times, we will also be able to give our neighbors some clean drinking water from this sealed tank. It’s a big expense but well worth it as we work on our goal of 100,000 trees for 2022.

Rosnie couldn't be more thankful for the new water tank that just arrived. Making sure every tree in the nursery gets just the right amount of water isn't an easy task, especially when our water supply is low, but Rosnie has kept our seedlings healthy and alive for over a year now.

Now we no longer have to use our motorcycle for multiple trips to the spring or preserve water so that seedlings only get a few drops each. With the new water tank, Rosnie will connect the hose and easily water the seedlings twice a day.

Open For Services

The sign reads: Here we grind breadfruit, peanuts, toasted corn, and cacao.

Whenever someone is available to run the mill, our nursery team places this sign outside for anyone who is in need of a mill. Our nursery caretaker, Rosnie is currently in training to manage the mill when Enel runs errands. We don’t charge for grinding breadfruit or cacao because we want to encourage the protection and growth of these high-value trees. But any other product costs 50 cents per ground mamit. The extra income will support our nursery team and the costs to keep supplies in stock.

Learning To Grow Breadfruit

It’s not easy to grow breadfruit trees. They die easily in the early days, but Rosnie and Enel have been watering them two times a day for six weeks. Thanks to their hard work, we only lost four of the 30 plants that sprouted from roots.

Both Rosnie and Enel are proud because breadfruit trees are becoming very popular. So popular, that even people going to Port-au-Prince want to take them but it'll be another month before we send the trees to homes.