The currently used kitchen of the farm is over 80 years old; it is dark and has little air circulation. The area that was previously used as a dining room, now serves as an additional kitchen prep area, since the farm has grown so much over the years, so have the number of personnel that need to be fed. This means, that currently there is no dining area, and the workers either take their meals home or eat it outdoors.
Thanks to the foresight and assistance of the Roger's family we're in the process of building a new kitchen instead of remodeling the current site. With their financial assistance we bought a used warehouse made out of steel, made chances on to the structure and remodeled it to serve as a kitchen.
This kitchen design provides for a large spacious kitchen and a large dinning room with plenty of air circulation. The kitchen has a good flow for a buffet style pick up for the food, and special space for a tortilla machine - a staple in every Nicaraguan meal. It will even have a second floor with a library for the workers. We graciously accept all donations of books (in Spanish) for the workers, specially related to agriculture. This will be a nice modern kitchen that will last more than the 80 years of its predecessor.
The old kitchen will be redesigned to be used as a laboratory for all the experiments that are done at the farm. These experiments include: learning more about composting, and finding new methods of producing organic pesticide with leaves and herbs.
This kitchen is now under construction, little is missing, and hopefully it will be used within the next 2 months. We are very grateful to Pete Roger and his family and so are our workers.
With the rising cost of energy throughout the world, including Nicaragua, we've decided to research alternate means of supplying the energy needs of the estate. This quarter we will be hosting 3 Dutch engineering students who are performing a detailed analysis of our current energy use and needs. They are also performing a study of the wind speeds in various locations throughout the estate to see if it would be possible to supply the energy needs of the estate through wind energy.
Once having identified a potential location to place a wind mill, the engineers have placed a wind meter to determine the wind speeds. In this picture, if you look right in the center of the image, you see the tower and the silhouette of the engineer at the top of the tower.
