ceylon acquired its independence in 1948 and has been known since then as Sri Lanka due to its location at the crossroads of key maritime trade routes Sri Lanka is a vital naval link between Western Asia and Southeast Asia this has been a center of Buddhist culture and religion since antiquity and today it's a multi-ethnic and religiously diverse country sri lanka is famous for producing and exporting tea coffee rubber and coconut but beside these there is a product that it's unknown in some countries in Latin America called cardamom this species was introduced in wat Amala in 1914 and today it's the largest cardamom exporter in the world it is also grown in Colombia and to know a little bit more about it we have to go to Valparaiso a town located in the southwest of Antioquia a province located in the heart of Colombia where this species has been grown for approximately twelve years there we spoke to some farmers who told us more about this crop but before let's get to know its origins and the challenges associated with working with this crop we're in the town of El Paraiso Antioquia it's a small but friendly amicable town people here are of the highest quality I've had this farm here for the last 25 years and I didn't have any promising cash crops that could generate income but I had soursop trees plantains and little things it was practically a recreational farm so it turns out that our town but Paraiso has been a very very compound without many problems but with high unemployment we reach the point fourteen years ago when we started to see social problems because of this talking with friends from here who have farms in the area we talked about these events and said I'm going through the same thing what are we going to do with these good people so all of us a group of five friends who have good farms here we resolve to have a coffee in the town square and think how are we going to improve this because we were facing social problems and that is a calamity while doing this we were there at 10 o'clock in the morning some gentleman from the town of Jericho showed up looking for people who wanted to plant cardamom it was completely new to us we didn't even know what the word cardamom meant so in talking to these gentlemen and I will make a long story short we reach the conclusion that it was the solution due to the crops advantages cardamom was a mysterious plant in this area everyone said what is that plant is it a wild plantain is it a Heliconia but when you start working with this crop you begin to see its benefits because it's a crop that gives a very good yield and can generate a lot of jobs so you end up helping the region as well the hardest part of starting out with cardamom was changing the mentality of the farm workers used to growing coffee because this is coffee country in any case we changed mines we still haven't been able to generate the kind of trust and enthusiasm that all should put into this kind of crop this has been very hard work since it's hard for people to believe in a new plant a plant that nobody knows you ask people do you know what cardamom is and they say I've heard that it's a fruit that supposedly fights bad breath but that's as far as they go that is true it's very good for your breath in any case that's been the main obstacle because convincing farmers to get into this is very hard in their source of the financial part why because no government entities nor anyone in the governor's office or the culture ministry nor people involved in farming knew about cardamom they don't know it still don't know it they don't know what the story is so it's been very difficult to reach these conclusions the hardest thing about starting with cardamom wasn't just the cultivation but selling it as well since this is a product purely for export establishing contacts abroad in order to export took time my father already had a lot of experience with the growing side of the operation and we were able to solve a lot of problems as they arose but on the issue of exporting we had a lot to learn in order to communicate fluidly and profitably with different cultures such as air Muslims people from India people from Pakistan so the hardest part was learning to speak in other languages so we could understand each other commercially cardamom is a type of herbaceous plant perennial and aromatic that can grow from two meters in height reaching up to four meters its foliage is alternate leaved and lanceolated and its size ranges from 40 to 60 centimeters the flowers are white and pale violet the fruit is a green yellow pod that's between 1 and 2 centimetres long and it contains small black seeds from cardamoms taxonomy its scientific name is ala Tarija Carta the momomo it belongs to the zingy Boresha family and to the Zynga bar genus among its family are also found musica which is the banana plant and Heliconius it has a monocot seedlings meaning it has just one coat illidan that's making its reproduction easier it is a perennial crop meaning its production process lasts a long time we can find 40 year old trees in this family of cardamom this is a herbaceous bush it's a herbaceous plant that can grow to 4 metres high and to one to one and a half metres wide the cardamom plant has a lance elated type leaves it's flowers are hermaphrodites that pollinate by intimately meaning that 71% of cardamom flowers are pollinated by insects Merilee of the order Hymenoptera that is ants honeybees bumblebees this family accounts for 71% of pollination the other 26% is due to rain or wind and the remainder of the pollination process occurs through natural autonomy meaning that since the plants flowers are hermaphrodites they self pollinate the plant reproduces itself not so easily through seed it reproduces sexually and it takes a long time for the plant to reach these sizes this is what you see here it's done that way as a trial evidently it yields good results but takes a long time otherwise the way to grow this crop is by using a rhizome like this when seedlings grow three to four leaves in the seed bed they are transplanted to the nursery where they must be protected in the shade the design of the nursery is tailored to the specific needs of the grower however the use of plastic bags as pots is common in order to facilitate handling and to guarantee good anchoring in the planting field between 20 and 30 days before transplanting to the field the shade in the nursery must be removed to help the plants acclimate by this time the plant should be between 60 and 80 centimeters tall planting must be performed in loose soil that's why we must use lands that have good topsoil and are thus easier to cultivate when a couple you say I'm pleased my fertility as I was saying we generally propagate cardamom through rhizome by propagating through rhizome we have to take a keen interest in the crop during the labors necessary for the plant to thrive and avoiding uncomfortable situations in the soil in Therese Lala's cultural de scaizi necesitan para que la planta soo ha en gwenna forma no montaner de as you can see here there are no weeds in the soil wheats are little plants that sprout up why because cardamom creates its own shade and with that shade it eliminates weeds habla any Mena those are benches however you have to plant it under high shade because that is what really protects the plant and makes it more productive the cardamom plant prospers under man-made or natural forest shade consisting a simultaneous agroforestry system in Colombia the plant develops well in altitudes between 600 and 1500 metres above sea level and average annual temperatures between 18 degrees and 35 degrees Celsius the plants light and ventilation requirements vary according to its development phase therefore shade must be regulated in a timely fashion in order to foster the right microclimate cardamoms agro-ecological requirements are they need an optimum temperature between 18 and 35 degrees Celsius an altitude between 600 and 1500 metres above sea level they also needs 75 percent relative humidity they need a slope between 5% and 20% they need sandy loam soil what is sandy loam soil it has more sand than silt and clay this is the optimum soil for the crop the crop also needs shade to cover between 70 and 80 percent the shade should be high the canopy must not be too dense and it should ideally be a legume since they perform nitrogen fixation where they pick up the nitrogen in the atmosphere and process it into the soil to feed the plant and cardamom is one of the crops that most needs nitrogen besides that legumes have a very thin leaf which allows the sun's rays to reach the crop and perform the right process fortunately very few pests attack cardamom generally we see root pests such as fuss arrium which can cause rotting of the roots you can see when the plant is infected with fuss arrium because its leaves start to turn yellow you immediately have to eliminate that plant because for sorry 'm is very invasive or apply commercially available solutions so that is one of the pests también tiene la flaca que este momento las thermo-pile it also has another pest that we are experiencing now that is very serious which is thrips thrips are a small insect that appears during periods of high temperatures que c'est comme la cascada these cursor trips eat the shell they eat the shell and leave a kind of weaving which is kind of pretty despite that it does not damage the seed inside cardamom like this can only fetch a low price it's easily rejected because it looks bad another pest you see in this crop is the palm weevil which is an insect that starts to attack from the base of the plant where it starts to eat making a tunnel and thus hurting the plant but that is a bug that for us is the least dangerous because it can be attacked easily they're easy to spot and we kill them easily they're easy to control now let's learn about the upkeep required for this crop so that it stays in good shape good morning Don albedo how are you very well and you what are you doing now I'm cleaning up these cardamom plants and for what purpose I am pruning and removing excess leaves now that it rained a bit to open up some room for this flowering that's growing here what Don albedo did to this plant was phytosanitary pruning the phytosanitary pruning he performed was drastic because the plant was being affected by direct sunlight these leaves here are the oldest the leaves start from the old here to the younger leaves at the top of the plant and in the oldest part you have to do phytosanitary pruning this control has to be very strict it's a very strict control because my plant can be otherwise affected precisely because these leaves that are starting to decompose and which are attached to the plant can affect me by producing too much humidity and when you have a lot of humidity inside the plant you can easily have proliferation of fungi as we can see in this plant in this plant the pruning hasn't been done yet and the leaves that are decomposing on the plant are preventing sunlight from reaching the leaves that are really going to produce food for the fruit so I have to shape the plant and allow these green leaves to get sunlight so that the chlorophyll can act and when the chlorophyll acts it will carry food to my product we've done well with cardamom we've done well because truthfully this is easier to work than coffee and it's more well people are buying it they're buying it all the time we have seen some of the care needed for the cardamom crop how to control disease and how to keep it in optimum conditions now let's look at the final process before commercialization how do we process this plant here we receive the cherry cardamom cherry cardamom is the cardamom that is harvested at the plantation when the cardamom reaches the plant we begin the drying process it enters the machine it goes to the silo where it stays between 38 and 40 hours at temperatures that range from 25 to 45 or 48 degrees Celsius as time goes on and with the experience that we have we know how frequently we need to manage the temperatures when the drying process is finished it goes to the tip removing machine tip removal consists on detaching a small stem in the back of the pot this must be done immediately after drying it goes to tipping it can now go to storage where the monitoring process continues monitoring is to sort the sizes we separate out five different sizes then we continue the process of color sorting which is done by the self the machine falls out we have two other machines one is a catcher and the other is still where we clean up debris and we take out all imperfect or immature grains that come with the product so we clean up with those two machines then it goes to the women where they finished cleaning and removing all the castoffs we remove cast offs so that we keep only the degrees of quality that we handle here we produce 9 quality grades of cardamom there are grades of green besides that there is a cast off which are the black pots or stained pots and also those that are cracked which we call open that gets set aside so that is the work that they're doing right now after classification comes warehousing there are two types of warehousing raw warehousing raw meaning it leaves the silo goes through the monitor and is sorted by size the other type of warehousing is when it goes through the whole process when it's gone through the tip remover through the monitor through the zelf tron through the catcher through the still and through the woman's hands and that is the final storage process and it's ready for packaging by now we need to have all 12 grades separated to finish off jaime muneerah and his father Alonso but tell us what working with cardamom means to them personally working with cardamom for me has been very satisfying from a personal point of view I have a great love for the countryside and deep affection a great enthusiasm for country folk to get ahead so from that point of view I'm committed to it I love the subject I want to spread it I want many growers to get into the field because if we join together and join our efforts we can be part of the solution for the environment for the planet we want to leave our grandchildren I'm an accountant and for me working with cardamom solve the very important problem mental tranquility because being here in this environment is definitely an incredible therapy I worked in accounting for 65 years I am now 81 years old and people tell me I don't look older than 60 that is because this that I've been doing for 15 years has given me an inner peace and a way to relax