Products & Markets: Toccha Comun II, 2027–2031

🌱 Why this farm exists

Many small farmers in the Mantaro Valley already grow without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Their fertility comes from a cycle as old as the valley itself: corn, alfalfa and potatoes feed the family and the animals (cuys, rabbits, chickens, sometimes a cow), and the animals' manure goes back to the fields. That cycle already holds most of what organic farming is made of.

What is usually missing is breadth: crops from many families rotated over three to five years, so pests and diseases never settle in; living habitat for the insects that eat the pests; soil that is built up rather than drawn down; and rest for the land when it needs it. Toccha Comun II is where we test those pieces on a small plot, write down what works and what fails, and give the plan away freely to any farmer who wants to make the same transition.

We are not credentialed experts and we do not pretend to be. We are the people who grow, sell and eat this food, and we believe that knowledge built by practice, shared among neighbours and tested in the open, is worth as much as any packaged solution. We welcome experts into that conversation, on the community's terms.

Diversity is also protection. As the climate shifts, the pests, rains and frosts that a single crop depends on can change faster than a valley can adapt. Farmers who already know a range of crops that thrive here are farmers who can respond.

🧺 What Toccha Comun II will sell, 2027–2031

Still a candidate: baby lettuce, baby spinach and mixed greens, which could fill a rest-year cell between cover crops for restaurant buyers.

🍅 Tomatoes at Toccha

This plot gives tomatoes one 27.5 m cell a year: 58 plants on a trellis, furrow water, hand tools, nights near freezing from June to August, and hail in the rainy season. The focus is cherries, which yield and sell best; cocktails and slicers get two plants each for evaluation.

• Open-pollinated only. No F1 hybrids, so every variety's seed is saved on the farm and shared through the network.
• Support system and yield. Trellised and pruned, your plants have averaged 1.7–3.5 kg each over a season, most near the top of that range, with weather and splitting pulling toward the bottom. Weekly harvest runs about 0.3–0.4 kg per plant, so 58 plants give roughly 20 kg a week for eight to nine weeks.
• Replacements, not plastic. The nursery raises about 40% extra plants, and rooted suckers from pruning add more. They replace plants lost to frost or hail; the rest are sold at the Chupaca Saturday fair.
• Frost and the trees. The eucalyptus line may soften a radiative frost close to the trees, but the tomato lane is the farthest from them, so do not count on it. On a clear, still night, irrigate in the afternoon and cover plants with cotton sheets, jute sacks or straw.

🏷️ Selling tomatoes: units and prices

Buyers in Peru compare tomatoes by the kilo, and specialty tomatoes cost several times more than market Roma. Sell units that cooks recognise, so the comparison becomes "this basket or that one" rather than price per kilo.

Selling at market yourselves captures the keystone; at your volumes that is where most tomatoes should go. The Weekly Sales sheet in the financial plan shows the units to prepare each week, wholesale and retail prices, and lets you set your own retail mix for every product.

• Always show a price. Let samples, flavour and an informed seller carry a higher price.
• Per piece: weigh a batch, value it at the kilo price, divide by the count, round up to the nearest 10–25 céntimos.
• Volume deal: raise the single price slightly and offer a round deal ("S/1.70 each or 3 for S/5"); if nobody buys singles, the single price is too high.
• "Mountain" pricing: the familiar Peruvian market pile, sized by trial.
• Mix or match: several varieties at one price, or a build-your-own basket from bins with a few ready-made baskets for buyers in a hurry.

📦 Packaging without plastic

A "till" is a basket that goes from farmer to buyer, sized by volume with an approximate weight: pint ≈ 250 g, quart ≈ 500 g.

🧼 The soap lines

Thirteen cold-process bars in three lines, all cut from wood box molds sized to a wire cutter, made in Chupaca and sold beside the vegetables, flowers, tincture and candles. Recipes, molds, scent plan, clays, natural colors, sourcing, costs and rules are in the soap plan (v4); this section keeps the market side in one place.

• Chacra (economical): lard and coconut, 80 g at S/ 5 or 3 for S/ 13, between Dove and Heno de Pravia per gram; plus the Farmer & Gardener Scrub and S/ 4 bags of retazos (cut ends). For neighbors who work the land and watch their budget.
• Suave (gentle): milk, lard, olive and avocado, little coconut, 7% superfat and 1% scent or none. The strongest margins of the three, so it carries wholesale at half price.
• Vegetal (animal-free): olive, coconut, avocado and cacao butter; no lard, milk, honey, beeswax or carmine. The dearest base at about S/ 5 a bar; S/ 15 retail, wholesale only once refined coconut is in.
• Local color and clay: achiote, palillo, cacao, alfalfa and cosmetic clays; Aco clay only after a lab test, but Aco soap dishes right away.
• No claims and registration: say what each bar is made of and how it feels. Bar soap needs a DIGEMID NSO; ask whether bars sharing a base can share one.

🌳 Our eucalyptus trees and agave plants

Eucalyptus trees

• Leaf infusion (already in the recipes). Eucalipto Spa uses about 40 g of fresh leaves per 500 g-of-oils batch (80 g per 1 kg batch). It is free and the trees will not miss it.
• Our own eucalyptus oil and hydrosol. The small still planned for lavender can also distill eucalyptus leaves. The yield is unknown, so run a trial with 1–2 kg of fresh leaves before counting on it. The saving is modest: each eucalyptus bar uses only about 1–1.4 g of oil, so 500 bars a year need roughly 0.6 kg. The lavender oil is what pays for the still.
• Caution. Eucalyptus leaf litter is reported to inhibit seedlings. Compost leaves well before they go near the vegetable cells, and use fresh leaves only for infusions.

Agave belt

• Identify them first. Blue-grey “penca azul” is Agave americana; “cabuya” is also used for Furcraea. Count the mature leaves. These plants grow slowly, flower once after decades and then die, so the belt is not a crop to strip.
• Fiber (cabuya, pita): the best use. Cut only a few outer mature leaves per plant a year, scrape or ret them to free the fibers (about a meter long, hard and coarse), wash and sun-dry. Uses that fit the plan: twine for the tomato trellis and the soap bands in place of jute or plastic, and rough scrub mitts, soap-saver bags and bar rests sold with the Farmer & Gardener Scrub. The fiber is too stiff for cloth.
• Not now. Tapping the heart for aguamiel or syrup kills the plant, and a food product would need its own sanitary registration. The belt stays as a living fence and windbreak along the trees; a flower stalk, if one ever comes, makes a long light pole.

🕯️ Candles

Hand-poured pillar and shaped candles in silicone molds, in high-melt soy, soy-coconut, soy-beeswax and pure Junín beeswax. Details in the candle plan (v2).

• Not for night lighting: aromatic and decorative, from a S/ 5 velita (and a S/ 3–4 seconds bin) to a S/ 55 centerpiece, every item at least 2× materials.
• Competition: branded container candles in Peru run S/ 18–50; ours come to about S/ 9–12 per 100 g of wax against S/ 27–38 for the brands, and none appear at the Chupaca or Huancayo fairs.
• Natural colors: the waxes are the color (cream soy, golden beeswax); achiote or palillo only in an outer over-dip; no powders inside candles.
• Wholesale: only the velita, Tree of Life and boxed sets, at about 70% of retail. Measure the Tree of Life mold with water: about 150 g, not 450–680 g.

🫙 Balms and wood butter

Anhydrous balms made in an hour on the soap stove, with farm calendula and lavender, Junín beeswax and cacao butter. Details in the balm plan (v1).

• Competition: Peruvian natural lip balms sell at S/ 15–21 for 4–8 g; Bee's Max wood wax at S/ 39 for 100 g. Ours undercut both at 3.4–6.2× materials.
• Rules: balms are cosmetics (NSO, no claims); wood butter and beeswax food wraps are not. No chest rubs.

🍵 Teas

Six blends (Sobremesa, Lavender Night, Citrus Valley, Junín Cacao, Cafetal, Toccha Garden) in single-cup and pitcher bags and small loose packs, with brewing tools. Details in the tea plan (v1).

• Market: 96% of Peruvian homes drink infusions, but only about 36 cups a person a year; buyers are mostly women over 45; Lima buys bags while the provinces buy loose herbs. Supermarket bags cost S/ 0.07–0.15, so ours are premium (about S/ 0.67 a bag) for Huancayo, hotels, cafés, tourists and gifts.
• Bags: the 4,000 drawstring bags (S/ 0.11 each) for now; heat-seal bags with string and tag for gifts; a Peruvian contract packer for double-chamber bags when volume grows.

🌶️ Culinary herbs and condiments

Dried farm herbs, Sal de Maras salts, a pachamanca rub, ají flakes and seeds, and Macha Andina, a Peruvian-style salsa macha. Details in the culinary herbs plan (v1).

• Don't fight Sibarita on basics (oregano S/ 3.90 for 50 g); sell blends, dried huacatay and muña, salts and the macha, which nobody we found makes in Peru.
• Grow huacatay, oregano, thyme, rosemary, muña, mint and lemon balm in a perennial bed outside the rotation; buy ajíes, Sal de Maras, garlic and spices.

💧 Echinacea tincture, sold without health claims

The plan makes tincture from each dug Echinacea block, starting with the July–August 2029 dig. One block of about 154 plants gives roughly 5 kg of dried root; at a 1:5 ratio that is about 25 litres, or around 800 bottles of 30 ml after losses. In the financial plan this becomes the largest revenue line, about a quarter of five-year revenue, so the selling rules below matter.

🌼 The other products

• Kale: bunches for the Chupaca fair, restaurants and the Bioferia. It travels better than chard, and your experience introducing kale to new buyers is the main asset here.
• Cut flowers: Rudbeckia bunches and, from 2028, Echinacea flowers, beside the vegetables and to florists, hotels and restaurants.
• Lavender: dried bundles and sachets for cooks and for candle makers, plus buds and sprigs for our own soap bars; the row also draws parasitoid wasps.
• Fava beans: green pods for local buyers; their main value is the nitrogen left in the soil.
• Edible flowers and huacatay: from the head-zone strip; small sales, free sprinkles on a customer's greens, and a way to start conversations about how the food is grown.
• Seed and plants: open-pollinated seed for the network; surplus replacements and rooted suckers at the Chupaca fair.

🛒 Where we sell

⚖️ Labels, the brand sticker and certification

• You can sell without certification. Certification is only needed to use the words orgánico, ecológico or biológico, which Peruvian law reserves for certified produce. An Earth Matter Peru sticker and a plain description of how you grow are fine.
• What the SGP would cost. There is no published fee yet. Junín formed its regional Participatory Guarantee System council in July 2026, meant to work at a "social cost", and it still has to be authorised by SENASA. The main costs are time: farm records, peer visits, meetings and an annual renewal. Third-party certification, by comparison, was reported at an average of US$10,000–12,000 a year (2019), which makes no sense at your scale.
• Recommendation: sell under the sticker now; ask the Junín SGP council about dues and timing once it is authorised, and join if the Bioferia or your buyers start asking for it.
• Registered products are separate from certification. The soap needs its own DIGEMID registration (NSO) and the tincture needs a written DIGEMID answer. Neither depends on the "organic" words.

🫘 Seed: heirlooms, hybrids and GMOs

Heirloom and open-pollinated seed breeds true. Save seed from a good plant and its children look and taste like it. That is what lets a community keep, share and improve its own varieties for generations, and it is why Toccha grows only open-pollinated tomatoes and saves seed of everything.

F1 hybrids come from crossing two parent lines. Their seed does not breed true because the parents' traits separate again in the next generation; that is genetics, not law. Growers can stabilise a hybrid by selecting over several generations, and many heirlooms began that way. Some commercial varieties are also protected by breeders' rights.

Genetically modified crops have genes changed in a laboratory rather than by crossing and selection. Peru currently has a moratorium on planting GMOs. Our stand is simple: food security rests on diverse seed held by the people who grow it, and every variety kept alive in the valley is a small act of that independence.

🗂️ Kept for other sites

Drip irrigation, black plastic mulch and a well or solar pump are not part of the Toccha Comun II plan. The drip notes are kept as reference for future locations.