Breadfuit Update! Our First Customer

Breadfruits are falling from the trees, and for the first time, the locals in our region are “catching” them. Now that we have a mill, word has spread all the way to Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince (PaP) about our new shop and services.

Thanks to our team’s hard work and word of mouth, our team has its first buyer! Someone from PaP ordered 100 pounds of breadfruit flour to sell in their store. This has increased the demand for the fruit, and locals are “catching” and cutting their breadfruit in tiny slivers with knives and graters, drying them, and then grinding the dried pieces in our mill for shipment to PaP.

One of our missions is to create self-sustainability in Haiti, and we’re happy to see people bringing in their own income from the breadfruit flour. When I go to Haiti, in late summer, even though the trees have little to give, I won’t see hungry people because they will have ground breadfruit flour and saved.

I need your help to spread the word and educate people on how to make use of the mill to create a healthy diet year-round. From breadfruit, cacao, peanuts, and corn, to yucca root flour, our mill will allow people to conserve more food than ever before during the dry summer season.

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.

Breadtfruit Flour Ready

Below, we have 60 lbs of breadfruit flour ready to sell in our market. More income offers new ways to increase our project’s reach, provide jobs, and expand our work in reforestation and self-sustainability.

400 Breadfruit Roots

Immediately after the konparet breadfruit seminar, Enel got back to work to increase our breadfruit output. He's growing as many breadfruit seedlings from roots as possible thanks to the knowledge he acquired in the Jeremie breadfruit factory.

We bought 400 hundred roots today that will go in a rich silty soil bed covered in mulch and that will be watered twice a day for a month.

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.

Increasing Our Breadfruit Flour Output

In the video below you can see the sundried breadfruit flour broken into pieces and being fed into our mill by Samuel, a farmer, and local artist.

As we fill the 20lb bags below, we'll send them to our professional chef, Marie Maude, who oversees the nursery land in Bwalo. She'll be making test products out of flour to sell all over the Saint Louis-de-Sud and Les Cayes regions.

Agronomist Nerva Gives A Seminar

Four hundred youth assembled today for a nursery seminar in Les Cayes. One of the main topics was increasing the volume of trees that provide the best foods for Haiti. Here, Agronomist Nerva is giving a lecture on Breadfruit trees while our team gives out konparets. The Haiti Tree Project plans to start a konparet production facility in our nursery locality soon.

Here you see a Komparet, a kind of dry sweet bread, that is being produced in Jeremie and we hope to produce it in Saint Louis de Sud. Our team spent the day exploring everything that is needed to produce this product from the seedlings to the ingredients.

Konparet Breadfruit Factory Visit

Today, six team members traveled to a breadfruit konparet factory in Jeremie, Haiti. Our team has been chiefly grinding breadfruit into flour, but thanks to the seminar, they'll learn to make more marketable products from the breadfruits we grow.

Agronomist Pierre Moise has been growing his breadfruit business for 10 years. And now thanks to the support of Trees That Feed, our team can start growing our own.

Here you see a konparet, a kind of dry sweet bread, that is being produced in Jeremie. Once our team returns to our Saint Louis de Sud, they’ll be able to teach the rest of the nursery team everything they’ve learned from how to produce this Konparet from the seedlings to the ingredients.

Breadfruit tends to be either overabundant at certain times of the year or hard to find most of the year. When it is in season, a lot of the fruit either falls to the ground and rots, or it's fed to livestock.

After you shred the ripe breadfruit, you can place it in the sun to dry. But during the rainy season, this method doesn’t work so you’d need a dehydrator like the one below. The pieces of breadfruit are on screens and hot air from the solar oven wings, push up through the center of the dehydrator like a fan and dries out the pieces. We hope to build one of these in Saint Louis one day.

At the konparet factory, our team was able to see how a fruit dehydrator works. Think about all of the dried fruits you purchase at stores; if we can purchase a dehydrator for our nursery, we'll be able to make nutritious products year-round with all of the fruit we grow.

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.

One Mamit of Breadfruit Flour

Now that we are making breadfruit flour we need to start packaging it by the pound. Today, Enel will take this “mamit” of flour to a scale in town and see how much it weighs so we can start packaging it by the pound.