Starling Farms outside of Kampot, Cambodia, grows and harvests by hand the black, red, and white pepper that has become a culinary delicacy among chefs around the world.
A Cambodian worker in a traditional headscarf hoes among the pepper towers at Starling Farms pepper plantation near Kampot, Cambodia.
Owen Thomas
Enlarge?Bong ? how much farther?? Our oldest son, Roswell, was asking our tuktuk driver how much longer we?d be bouncing along this potholed dirt road somewhere in Cambodia. In Khmer (pronounced ?k?MAI,?), you address any male older than you as ?bong?: it means ?older brother.?
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A visitor offers a video tour of the Starling Farms pepper plantation.We were heading toward a pepper plantation that the driver had assured us he knew how to find. There were five of us jammed into the tuktuk ? a four-passenger cart pulled by a motorcycle. (It?s like riding in an escaped carnival ride.) We?d left the riverside city of Kampot in southern Cambodia far behind; past the city center with its giant statue of a durian fruit, past endless low shops lining either side of the asphalt road, and onto a dirt track. We had been bouncing along like this for maybe 20 minutes.
?Ten minutes,? the driver said.
We passed small neat farms, with one-story houses up on stilts, Brahma cows strolling by or lying down, and strutting long-legged chickens. Emerald-green swaths of ? something. Is that what rice looks like? Little children wearing shorts would wave vigorously as we chugged past and shout ?Hello!? They seemed delighted to make a connection. Their lively greetings sounded like bird calls.
But now the landscape was getting scruffier, more hilly. There was more exposed red dirt, and no farms. Where was he taking us?
Ten minutes later we passed a sign for the Starling Farms pepper plantation, and soon bumped to a halt. We?d arrived, our driver indicated, and pointed down the slope. I saw rows of what looked like evenly spaced green towers. As we got closer, we saw that the towers were openwork brick columns, like chimneys, about 10 feet tall. They were wrapped in lush green vines ? pepper plants, which in the wild wrap around the trunks of trees. We spotted the green berries, peppercorns, clumped in strings about three inches long. Most of the berries were small and green, but a few ? no more than three per clump ? were red.
The rows of towers stretched into the distance. We saw a few workers, wearing the typical Khmer head cloths, hoeing among the towers.
?Be careful of the ants,? our driver warned. Leaf-weaver ants can sting, but they also attack other insects. On this certified organic farm, we learned later, further insect control was achieved by soaking in water the leaves of a weed that grows naturally among the plants, and then spraying the concoction on the plants; it?s a natural insect repellent. Workers rub the leaves on their arms to keep biting insects away. All the fertilizer used is organic, too: cow dung, bat guano (from nearby caves), small fish, plant matter ? and more of the insect-repelling weeds. The fertilizer is composted anaerobically in big underground pits, then spread on the plants.
We could go up to the gift shop, our driver said. And just as we approached a rather grand-looking two-story stone home, someone driving a big Land Rover pulled up ? the owner, it turned out. The gift shop was the front room of his house, which overlooked the plantation in the valley below. It seemed a beautiful, tranquil spot.
?I originally bought the land as a getaway from Phnom Penh,? said owner Mark Hanna, a CPA originally from Derry, Ireland. He mostly lives and works in the city, a grueling four-hour drive. In fact, the roads were so bad that he?d considered buying a helicopter, he said, to get back and forth more easily. He?d also considered buying a brick factory ? and now wished that he had. He?d needed a million bricks to make the pepper towers. And now, with building in nearby Vietnam booming, the cost of bricks had gone up 1,000 percent. His wife, Anna (?to be honest,? Mark said, ?she does all the work?), who is Cambodian, plans to expand the plantation. But they?d be using cheaper, less durable wooden towers this time.
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