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A breeze crackling through the dead leaves of a nearby banana tree and the hum of a few circling insects are the only sounds. From time to time, Coh breaks the silence with a whack of his machete or a sigh as he exerts himself while working.
The Mayan farmer carves out a living on 40 acres of rocky hillside in the village of San Antonio in the Cayo District of Belize where he was born. He describes the operation as "mechanized," though most days the machete, a sharpened stick and his hands are the only tools used.
There is no noisy combine at harvest time. No chatty field hands sow seeds or pick watermelons. There are no sprinklers hissing water onto the tomato and hickama plants. Farmers in San Antonio must wait for the rain.
A tractor is used to prepare the land, and Coh's cousin, Paulino, sometimes helps him on the farm, but most days only Coh works the dark soil.
Solitude has its benefits.
"What happens with the farming, you don't have a boss. You are the boss. If I want to go to the field, I go. If not, I stay home," the 39 year old says through a smile. With that, deep laugh lines break the smooth, tanned surface of his face revealing his Yucatan ancestry.
Coh began farming for himself in 1981 after working with his father as a laborer on Mennonite farms. Peanuts were his first crop. He says he learned the trade from other farmers and from the Mennonites, members of a religious sect from Germany who settled in Belize in the 1950s. Today they control most of the country's commercial farming, and independent farmers like Coh struggle to earn a living.
Still, Coh's mechanized farming methods are an improvement over the slash and burn milpa techniques used in the past by his father and other Mayan forebears. Until recently, Coh traveled the 1.5 miles from his home to his plantation on horseback. He says he never dreamed he would own a vehicle. Today, the 1983 Isuzu Pup pickup he bought three years ago carries him along the rutted feeder road that the government built in June.
There is a farmers' cooperative in San Antonio that started the same year Coh began farming, but he did not join until a decade later. He is now the chairman. He shares one tractor, a few pieces of farming and processing equipment and lots of advice with the other dozen members of the group.
"Maybe if I could have gone to college, I would not have been a farmer," Coh says. He said his grades and test scores were good, but his family had no money for school, so Coh only made it through the sixth grade.
Today, he is struggling to earn enough money to send his 16-year-old son, Amin, to Sacred Heard College in nearby San Ignacio. He also plans to send his two daughters, Ivy, 11, and Estelva, 12, to college if they want to go.
"It is good to have education in your child," Coh says. "If you don't have a degree, you can't get jobs in the office. Not like before, with only primary school, that's a lot you could get. Right now, if you don't have your master's degree or diplomas, you can't get anything. It's hard."
Coh admits that farming is also difficult. Despite his lack of formal education, he speaks four languages and is pursuing ways to expand his business. He is exploring organic farming methods and is looking for new markets for his produce. He says he would like area farmers to work together to rotate the planting of similar crops, which could keep prices more favorable, rather than flood the market.
Coh and his wife, Everilda, do not have much furniture, but the living room of their wood frame home is piled to the ceiling with 100-pound bags of roasted peanuts. He brought them inside to protect them from the rain he expected Hurricane Iris to bring. Intense rain never came, but Coh plans to keep the peanuts until he can find a buyer who is willing to pay a fair price for them.
Most of the plants on Coh's farm have a three-month cycle from planting to harvest. These cycles seem to set a rhythm to his life and his household. So, even though the peanuts have been harvested and the corn is drying on the stalk, Coh returns to the field to tend young bell peppers, hickama and cabbage.
There is always work to be done, but Coh takes solace in knowing that he is his own boss.
-- Paula Ouder