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.

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.

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.

Porch Security Needed

Now that we have an extremely valuable grinder, we need a secure place to store it. Since it runs on a gasoline motor, we use it outdoors to avoid filling the depo with gas fumes and contaminating the flour.

When no one is around to watch the mill, we have to move it inside. Since we use it daily, it's difficult for our team and places unnecessary stress on the grinder, so we're looking to close the porch on our depo with iron bars. The iron bars will protect the mill and allow us to store milled products. Getting these bars is a priority, but unfortunately, they cost $800.

Please consider donating to support our mill investment which is an investment in the security and future of the communities we serve in Haiti.

Making Fine Flour With Our New Mill

The grinder is working amazingly. We’re thankful to Trees That Feed for helping us purchase the mill.

We’re excited that people are developing new ways to use breadfruit flour. Now, we are searching for a high-quality plastic bag to seal the flour for long shelf life and for selling in the cities of Haiti.

A New Mill!

Our Nursery Manager, Enel, searched the streets of Les Cayes until he found a brand new mill for the nursery. It's up and running at home in LaSikri.

We primarily plan to use the mill to produce breadfruit flour, increasing the demand for breadfruit trees in the region. We'll also be able to grind cacao and increase interest in planting cacao trees, which we know has a lot of value once fully grown. Through increasing our production, we'll be expanding on one of THTP missions, which allows communities to produce a variety of crops from their trees.

We also realize that the mill can be used as a source of additional income. We were asked to grind large amounts of peanuts and corn in the first few days. We're charging 50 cents per large can, and that income is being recorded for the community to see and then grow more trees.