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By SUSANNE QUICK
squick@journalsentinel.com

Second of two parts

Punta Uva, Costa Rica - Milwaukee Public Museum officials are betting that people will pay a premium for a chocolate bar made from cacao that grows in the shade, that helps the environment and that provides small-scale Costa Rican farmers with a decent living.

And yes, they think it will taste good too.

Raising the Bar The Museum and Chocolate Photo/Rick Wood Miguel Lopez (foreground) and other workers place cacao pods in baskets at the 4,500-acre FINMAC farm, the largest producer of chocolate in Costa Rica. Photo/Rick Wood Jake Hanson, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uses a special camera mounted on a telescopic pole to measure the light level at various heights in the tree canopy of a cacao and banana farm in central Costa Rica. He and other researchers hope that by documenting shade levels they can help farmers find ways to promote cacao pod production and more effective natural insect control to encourage sustainable farming. Photo/Rick Wood Chris Vaughn, a post-doctoral fellow in wildlife ecology at UW-Madison, discusses challenges of working with cacao trees in different environments in Costa Rica. With him are (from left) researcher Bob Mack, Ray Guries and Allen Young. Photo/Rick Wood Allen Young (left) of the Milwaukee Public Museum, and Ray Guries, a forestry professor at UW-Madison, have spent much of their careers looking for ways to develop sustainable agriculture in Costa Rica that supports small farmers and helps sustain the rain forest and diverse natural fauna of Costa Rica.

That's why they'll start selling their own eco-friendly dark chocolate bar, Cacao de Vida, this winter.

Yet, separate from whether the bar will please consumers, so far there is little scientific evidence to prove that cacao survives better in the shade or that animals prefer canopied cacao farms more than open plantations. It's all speculation and anecdotal observation.

Allen Young, senior vice president of academic affairs at the Milwaukee Public Museum, is out to rectify that. He and a team of researchers, from the museum and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have embarked on a series of experiments to evaluate the "friendliness" of different kinds of cacao plantations. (Pronounced "ka-kow," it is often referred to as cocoa in the United States.)

They're hoping they will find an optimal point at which cacao trees flourish, large-scale forest removal is avoided and farmers can make a decent living. By evaluating cacao's preferred growing conditions and examining the number and types of birds, mammals, lizards, insects and spiders that visit them, the scientists are hoping to paint a picture of the perfect cacao plantation.

"This has never been quantified before," Young said. "We'd like to get that information."

And so, too, would the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is funding the five-year study.

"They want to see some real hard science," Young said.

The government's interest, Young said, lies in the hope that cacao will provide a profitable form of agriculture for tropical farmers who have been tempted to grow illegal - but high-paying - crops such as coca, marijuana and poppy. Drug-growing isn't a huge problem in Costa Rica, but U.S. officials hope they can apply what they learn in countries such as Colombia, Panama and Ecuador.

So, Young and company are going to find out whether they can make farmers, the feds, biologists and a few animals happy.

Distant beginnings

Cacao originated deep in the forests of the Amazon basin - a habitat dominated by shade and little disturbance.

But when the plant was domesticated, it was brought out of the forest and into the sun. It grew to heights rarely seen in the dark undergrowth of the South American rain forest. And its fruits, the pods that produce cacao beans, swelled and ripened to magnificent melon-sized orbs.

Even though trees grew better in full sun, they were more susceptible to insect infestation and disease. And their natural pollinators, little black midges, became scarce, said Young, who researched the midge issue in the late 1980s.

Young figured there had to be a place between full sun and heavy cover in which the domesticated cacao tree could flourish but also be safe.

Young planted genetically identical cacao trees in three types of environments: dense forest, partially shaded forest and open plantation.

"As an agricultural experiment, it was a nightmare," he said. "But as an ecological one, it was fascinating."

That's because although his crop success was low, especially in the dense forest, the lessons he learned about different environmental influences were startling.

After six years of growth, the cacao plants that survived in the forest looked more like tiny bean sprouts than trees. Meanwhile, their open plantation counterparts grew to great heights and produced football-sized bean husks.

"Here you have the same genetic stock," he said, but they took on different forms depending upon the environment they were seeded in.

The trees grown in partially shaded forest fared somewhere between the other two.

Young also observed that even though the trees from the dense forest were tiny, their leaves were healthy and robust. The ones in the open plantation had largely been denuded by insects.

"I think this says something about the balance of the rain forest," where trees and plants scattered about the forest make it difficult for full-fledged insect attacks, Young said.

Optimal light

Young's work was fairly general in its mission - just comparing how plants grow in shade and sun.

But if the Costa Rica effort is to succeed, both in the Department of Agriculture's quest for alternatives to drug producers and in the museum's quest for a candy bar that makes money and improves the environment, more detailed work is needed.

That work has begun.

Ray Guries, professor and chair of UW-Madison's forestry department, and Jacob Hanson, a graduate student, went to Costa Rica in June to measure light on the farm of Alberto Moore, a small-scale cacao farmer who lives near the Caribbean coast.

To find the optimal light conditions for cacao, they first had to examine the rays currently getting through.

Moore's farm looks more like a patch of woodland than a typical Midwestern farm. It is densely populated with tall trees, some producing mango, banana and cacao. At first glance, his cacao trees appeared healthy: They produced fruit and were decently sized. But closer examination revealed something else - the trees had been ravaged by frosty pod and witches' broom, two virulent fungi.

Moore has been considering turning his land into a banana farm. But Guries, Hanson and Bob Mack, an agricultural consultant in Costa Rica, persuaded him to hold off for a while.

Moore "is not anxious to manage something that he thinks is disease prone," Guries said. So, in order to persuade the farmer to keep cacao, they promised to knock down his diseased trees and introduce grafts of a hardier, more disease-resistant variety.

This summer, before removing the infected trees, they analyzed the light on his farm.

Using a special camera equipped with a fish-eye lens, they measured the light coming through the canopy at specific places around the property.

"It's amazing how the human eye can fool itself," regarding the amount of light it perceives, Guries said.

You could be standing in the middle of a thick forest on a sunny day at noon and think a lot of light was coming through, Guries said, when in fact, if you were to pull out a light meter, it would read very little.

Having set a baseline for the amount of light hitting each diseased tree, they'll take down the old ones this winter and replace them with new ones. Then they'll start to tweak the amount of light falling on the young cacao sprouts by adjusting the shade.

Plantation pests

As that research continues, there is a parallel question: What is the relationship between cacao and animals - and how much damage do the animals cause?

Suzannah Crandall, an undergraduate at Beloit College, recently completed research on the subject at a large cacao plantation in Costa Rica owned Hugo Hermelink, a Dutch farmer. It's the plantation that will be providing the cacao beans for the museum's chocolate bar.

With guidance from her adviser, Chris Vaughan, a postdoctoral fellow in wildlife ecology at UW-Madison, she discovered that fungi posed the greatest threat to cacao. Monkeys, squirrels, parrots and woodpeckers caused little or no damage, she found. The reason the animals caused so little damage, she determined, was because there was little suitable habitat for them to live in.

In other words, just as had been expected, the wide-open plantation style of farming is not particularly conducive to a variety of animal life.

And that's where Vaughan and a handful of other researchers come in. They want to look at different cacao environments and evaluate which ones will sustain an animal population and which ones won't.

"As far as I know, nobody has conducted these kinds of experiments" on cacao farms, said Young, although shade-grown coffee has received some scientific interest. "I think what we're doing is very cutting edge."