This episode of #PodSaveChocolate features an interview with Volker Lehmann, a German-born and trained tropical agronomist who’s been working in Bolivia for over two decades. Volker is best known in the cocoa and chocolate communities as the person who first introduced the wild cacao of the Bolivian Beni, harvested on his chocolatale, the Hacienda Tranquilidad, into the market in 2006 by convincing Felchlin to take on his beans – a non-trivial task.

Since then, Volker has been a champion of Bolivian cacao grown throughout Bolivia, not just in the area of the Beni department that surrounds the Hacienda Tranquilidad, but also in Alto Beni, where farmed cacao, mainly organic, has been produced since the 1970s. There he owns a harvest center “Flor de Cacao” in the town of Palos Blancos, where Heirloom Cacao Preservation (HCP) #1 was produced in 2013.

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This episode of #PodSaveChocolate features a discussion of the tools, resources, and approaches I use when researching chocolate and cocoa on the #Interwebs. These techniques have been developed and honed over more than thirty years spanning careers in high tech and chocolate.

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This episode of #PodSaveChocolate features a discussion of regenerative agriculture, its goals and methods, through the lens of “Is this the best idea? Is it even a good idea? What might be missing? What can we learn from other approaches, such as agroforestry and ancient practices such as the milpa? What is agropequaria and does it have a role? What is the regenerative movement a response to? What does a regenerative ag cocoa farm look like?”

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