Hot stuff
Aidan Hartley
Iread once in the Field that the experience of owning a Scottish estate was like standing under a cold shower ripping up £50 notes. The image could apply to my farm in Kenya, except our water comes in a bucket delivered by donkey and there are no £50 notes to hand, since my overdraft is roughly equal to Guinea Bissau’s national debt. I’m now in London investigating how to make a small African farm pay for itself on 450mm of annual rainfall, the meagre earnings of a freelance journalist and no EU-style subsidies.
I’ve already tried fattening sheep, but this is Kenya and gangsters shot my butcher in the head as he returned from an auction. For a spell I traded honey. My friend Tom and I marketed it as an aphrodisiac. The best label we could come up with was ‘Honey — For Your Sexy’, which customers found off-putting. Two years ago, I managed to abandon boxes of the stuff in a friend’s Nairobi attic. I’ve got a herd of Boran cattle and Kenyan beef is the best I’ve ever tasted. But we can’t export it to the EU and — I’m not exaggerating here — we’ll make 50 pence an acre a year off them as long as they don’t die in the next drought.
My brother Richard suggested growing cochineal beetles on prickly pear cactus. There’s fresh enthusiasm for natural food dyes in the West and you can apparently get £13 a kilo for dried beetle. They feed off the cactus leaves, which one can later use as forage for cattle. Prickly pear is a wonderfully delicate fruit, and this can be sold or made into jam. The hitch is that I took up ranching in order to live an outdoor, masculine life, riding out under the burning sun to look at my cattle. I don’t wish to be a rancher of beetles.
I’m looking at how I can cash in on the carbon sequestration scam, which means growing trees paid for by European companies trading EU tax credits. It’s so complicated I don’t really understand how it works. In any case, I hear they want us to grow eucalyptus rather than indigenous species, which sounds to me like another fine way to cock things up in Africa.
I’ve even looked at ‘farming’ meteorites. Our area is famous among scientists because it has been battered with some major meteorite showers in the recent past. I haven’t found one yet but I just know they’re out there somewhere on the eroded, rocky parts of the farm. Meteorite sells for between seven and 75,000 quid a gram. Prices depend on whether your rock comes from an asteroid, a planet, a burned-out comet or the moon. A kilo of anything would make me happy.
The last time I was in London my friend Kevin gave me my new big idea. He’s a food expert, and at lunch I asked him what I should be growing. He said whatever is specialised and fashionable in two years’ time. ‘It’s pomegranate this year,’ he said. ‘And in two years it will be organic chilli peppers.’ ‘Chilli peppers?’ ‘Yes. Sun-dried or smoked. Smoked on a rope.’ And so I’ve entered the weirdly sadomasochist subculture of red hot chilli peppers. Capsicums come in a range as diverse as garden roses or apples but they are much more exotic. Instead of your golden russets, Cornish honeypin and River’s Nonsuch you have your jalapenos, habaneros, chipotles and Scotch bonnets. In Kenya we call them pili pili ho! ho! A chilli’s heat is famously measured in Scovilles, an index invented by Wilbur Scoville in 1912, and the cognoscenti gathered in an internet club of sites called The Ring of Fire — appear determined to find the hottest chilli known to humankind. Look at a Finnish site www.fatalii.net and you’ll see photos of chilli-eating Nordics who are in such pain one is holding a pistol to his head. Also, the competition is on to find a salsa with the most ridiculous name. Award-winning brands are ‘Slap My Arse and Call Me Sally’ and ‘Jump Up and Burn Yo Butt’. I’ve thought about making a range of salsas appropriate to the continent: policegrade ‘Riot Control’, ‘Grand Corruption’ or, the ultimate, ‘Humanitarian Crisis’.
Instead, I think I’ll follow Kevin’s advice. He gave me three types of organic seeds to test out: green Pimiento Padron from Galicia, the hot, cherry-like Satan’s Kiss and one I’m banking on for sun-drying, which is a large Italian cayenne that will look great dried or smoked and hanging in your kitchen for spaghetti alla puttanesca. A good thing about chillis is that elephants — which routinely raid our vegetables — fear and loathe them. The test crop is due for harvesting in July and I’m buying more seeds to take home. I can’t see the early signs of frenzy for chilli on the scale of tulip mania just yet, but I’m living in hope.
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