One lives and learns.  It has been a year of evolving insights.  Here are a few of of my most important learnings - things will be done a little differently around here in 2012!

Coffee people have NO time from September - February, between the coffee harvest, heavy rain and festivals and parades nothing else will get done.  Factor in that Project Management is as yet an unheard of art up here in the mountains and this means big trouble  for any piece of work bigger than a small task.

Insight:   Instead of spending the summer months January - July on the beach; This is the time to get things done.   Project management will have to be done by yours truly (concepts of sequence, capacity limitations and deadlines are not relished by locals).  It will start with a project plan that I will manage like a terrier.

Same thing on a micro daily basis.    Most of the year it rains.   It starts raining around lunch time.  Rain is a show stopper.  Workers go home or hide in the greenhouse, streets get all muddy making shopping an unattractive proposition.   Sometimes, it rains so hard it is dangerous to go out at all.

Insight:  No drinking or partying that will result in lying in bed in the morning with a headache.  Get up when it gets light, get moving, do everything and make sure everyone else does everything before lunch.

In Panama there is no such thing as a fixed price on anything.  Everything is up for negotiation.  Not a problem per se if you do the negotiating yourself.   Although you start from  a huge disadvantage as a Gringa female - you can always say no.  I am OK with that.

However, it becomes an unmanageable problem to let anyone else in on the negotiating .  You think you are paying them for doing their piece of work and they are also making money on all the raw materials and probably other people's work the sides.   Sometimes big $$$ involved sometimes very very small.

Insight: Unfortunately micro-management is the name of the game here and the need to acquire an appetite for auditing $s from your purse to final destination.  Beware of gasoline and horse feed levels dropping too quickly.   So, although I was never one to draw lines on the whisky bottle or count the candies in the candy jar...........that may need to change.

Deals and life in general in the jungle is about 'life eating life' - think what you see going on around a bird table.  No gentlemanly approach can be assumed. There is a culture in this young country of chasing the short term win vs aspiring to a longer term business relationship or partnership.     Nothing to be ashamed of in winning that way here in Panama.  Those who are too generous, too trusting well they are seen as a little stupid.

Have some guys in today picking coffee for the local market.  As you can see these are not the juicy all red perfect cherries we will be picking later on.    It is now raining outside and there is a smell of coffee wafting on the breeze over the farm from Cafe Ruiz who must be having a roasting day today.

This morning, I intercepted this wheel barrow on the way to the compost heap.   We have guava falling off the trees.  Apparently, we need a little piglet or two to eat these up as well as the spare plantains and bananas.   If I understood right, a piglet costs about $40 and in 8 months could be worth $300.  If true and if you can feed them from your farm scraps then this is a better business than coffee?

Today, I learned to prune a coffee bush.   We had a couple of downed trees that had fallen on our coffee and by default had taken the coffee mature trees back to almost ground level.  

With the rains the bushes started sprouting every which way.  Today, I learned, we need to remove all this growth and leave just  four main shoots.  

Otherwise, we are wasting resources on this plant.  Every coffee plant should cost about $25 cents a month to keep here......so that works out at about three dollars a year.  When you multiply by ten thousand bushes or so.........then you get the logic.  You need every bush to be cared for on a regular basis.

This is not so different from gardening British style, sort of tending the garden.  So, now I am doing it on coffee bushes, pink long gardening gloves, felco pruning shears and wellington boots still relevant.   So, I rolled up my sleeves and started stripping off shoots.   Enjoying very much this hands on thing.   

We have several types of banana here on the farm.  They are all out of this world good, the most delicious balance of fruit, acidity and sweetness.  A flavor you only ever get when you cut them fresh from the bunch. 

 This week, I learned that we had been selling spare bananas to the local mini-mart for $2 for a bunch of 200 bananas or more to retail them to locals here.  That would be about a cent a banana or one hundred times less than the ones in Starbucks.    Similar story for our coffee.   Such is life as a producer in the tropics!