Decision

During this time I was correponding by email with Roger. In late November 2004 he mentioned a few projects he was considering. One involved buying a property in the city of Cajamarca and turning it into a hotel. Another was to build up a herd of cattle and sell the milk to Nestle (Nestle does in fact by milk in Peru). Another far more ambitious project we talked about was growing and processing Tara (Peru is a major exporter of this product apparently used in the leather industry). But this would have required expensve heavy machinery and other high costs. We didn´t have the capital for that one.

After thinking about it back in England, and seriously wondering if I was crazy for even contemplating this I came to an agreement with Roger. The option we decided upon was growing a crop called Alfalfa. The English term for it is Medic, but I will refer to it in the Spanish, Alfalfa. I had never heard of it before so I did a google search on it and found out it´s a crop which is grown all over the world but is especially fast growing in tropical regions and is used as cattle and animal feed. Although it´s a very cheap crop so we would have to produce it in bulk. Alfalfa requires a lot of water to grow properly. Now, because it only rains seven or eight months a year in Cajamarca our project involved buying a pump and sprinkler system to water the Alfalfa plants from a well during the dry months. I would invest the money to buy the equipment whilst we would use Roger´s land on which to grow the Alfalfa. However, we would only use the land for four years, after this the pump and the equipment could be used in a different project somewhere else and the land would be sold off. I would travel to Cajamarca to live, and we would execute the project together. Roger was able to recruit Yessenia, the secretary at Bruce Peru at the time, to come and work with us and eventually to manage the day-to-day running of the project when we were gone.