Chaac
Guillermo sits on his chair surveilling the crop status dashboard on his monitor. It’s harvest day at the Buena Espera Indoor Farm in Campeche. About twenty feet further down the hallway, out of sight of his small control room, rows and rows of wooden shelves reach all the way to the roof of their refurbished warehouse. They carry infinite amounts of fruits and vegetables: maize and beans, epazote and manioc grow on each layer and sprawl out of the sides longing for more space. Bees dance around the overflowing structures searching for a source of nectar. Guillermo has been in the community of Buena Espera for several years, welcomed with open arms to this group of outsiders often referred to as Pirates of the Yucatan for their rebellion against modern agricultural practices. And today was a special day for the pirates: they would celebrate the weekly harvest ritual.
He never thought that his life would pan out this way. Born just shortly after the dawn of a new millennium, he grew up in Ciudad de Mexico miles away from anything resembling a farm. Nature meant for him a walk in the city park. He graduated from college with a degree in computer engineering — partly because he was interested in the emerging fields of artificial intelligence, but more so because he thought it would give him a stable future. After a few stops at different tech startups, he got hired by a large corn plant factory in the outskirts of the city to oversee their technology.
After a dozen years of research, a group of Mexican and Chinese researchers successfully isolated genes from agave and a strain of yeast and introduced it to corn. The resulting short growth cycles and succulent kernels made the new variety an ideal candidate for mass production. The city had expanded significantly in the last decade and providing enough food was a major challenge that these high-tech plant factories with their engineered crops promised to address. The new corn, nicknamed El Ñango by the local population for its inability to be used in tortillas, quickly became the symbol of cheap industrial food poised to overtake traditional Mexican food culture.
At the corn plant factory Guillermo was in charge of the autonomous harvest system, a conductor for an orchestra of drones doing the manual labor in the farm. Pretty much everything was different to Buena Espera. He worked long hours improving the algorithms that control the eternal rhythm inside the growth chambers — planting, growing, harvesting all in 29 days, 12 times a year. What used to be done by laborers, was now completely automated and completed by a fleet of drones and autonomous vehicles, no humans were allowed inside the white chambers to maintain a sterile environment. Eventually, when the algorithms became efficient enough, Guillermo became obsolete as well.
The Pirates approached him several weeks after he was let go. Would he be interested in visiting Buena Espera? Guillermo didn’t need much convincing, after years of monotonous drive for more efficiency at the factory, he was ready for a change. The farmers at Buena Espera had a different understanding of cultivation: cooperation with rather than submission of nature. At Buena Espera he is now responsible for all technical components of the operation: bio-integrity conservation, microclimate management, fixing the refrigerator. And on harvest days like today, he is responsible for making the saka, a drink of honey and maize.
Guillermo leaves his control room to go to the sacred vault to start the harvest ritual. In this chamber, barely wide enough for him to stretch out his arms, he begins the ancient tradition to maintain the natural cycle of life by preparing the saka, the sacramental beverage. With steady and practiced hands he smashes the maize from the last harvest and grinds it into a fine paste. Slowly, he begins to mumble the words that have been passed down to him from his predecessor to call upon the gods. When the saka is ready, he carries it into the grow chamber where he meets the rest of the team. In the middle of the farm, stacks of plants towering all around them, they stand in a circle. Slowly, he walks to the center of the group, watched by a few dozen pairs of eyes and a few thousand sensors calibrated to detect the slightest change in air composition. He raises the chalice to his heart and requests the blessings of Chaac — the god of rain. After the spirits have been pleased, he passes the divine drink to his team. One by one, they sip on the corn juice sweetened by the holy honey of the farm’s pollinators. Solemnly, they thank the god for the food that has been given to them. Then they disperse into the farm to proceed with the harvest.
This story is a part of the series “Finding Tomorrow”. Read the introduction here.
