Illustrating further Tierra s responsiveness to culinary trends, Emile adds that the company is now growing nasturtium flowers as a salad ingredient. Bell peppers, especially the red-colored varieties, are one of the company s biggest products and are grown under plastic in greenhouses on the farm. Tierra grows the peppers in a mixture of media, cocopeat, and regular soil. A stream runs through the farm as well, but contains run-off from farms farther upstream and therefore is not a good source of irrigation water. Products are packed in plastic bags or clamshells and then placed in plastic crates for delivery by truck.
Some produce is packed in waxed cardboard boxes and air shipped to other parts of Indonesia.
Orders from hotels and restaurants generally are taken in the afternoon by Tierra s Jakarta office, and are relayed to the farm via radio. They see some small orders of a few kilos here and a few kilos there, but don t seem to comprehend the big picture, which is that we are an established company with regular customers. We re a new kind of agricultural enterprise, and the banks are more comfortable loaning money to big plantations or state-owned companies. Working with contract farmers and growing more mainstream products are two options Tierra has considered but ultimately rejected. Although many hotels have asked the company to supply locally grown, lower-value vegetables, so far Tierra has held back because of low profit margins and the added work of dealing with contract farmers.