I noticed it first as I would ride between farms. The long lines of foliage drying in the countryside. Beans hung up on barbed wire--which is used for everything including clothes lines. In town trucks filled with bean sacks rumble through. The once quiet cooperatives and otherwise vacant storefronts are bustling with sack after sack of beans. Each bag is emptied out, dried, sifted, and bagged for sale. The cosecha primaria, or first harvest is in full swing. This is the biggest harvest of the year and I´ve got court-side tickets.

Today I went out to the family farm with my host brother. It is a hundred or so meters above Yalí, and only three kilometers down the road. We hiked along a beautiful creek upstream from Yalí and up to the plantaciones. As we approached I heard repeated dull thuds. The workers pull the lightly dried bean pods onto a tarp and beat them mercellously until every bean has been freed from its husk. They discard the empty husks into a second pile. They stand on the beans, a slowly but surely growing hill of dark red kidney beans. I hiked around the farm for a few hours, and when I returned, the beans were bagged. My host brother was putting away all his paperwork and protecting his meticullous calculations. The pile of dried, beaten, sorry husks are set to an immediately roaring blaze.

We drove back to town just as it began to drizzle. I realized that almost every field with the tell tale burned look of beans in cosecha had an equally large blaze going. The air was filled with smoke. There were smoke lines coming from every farm and hillside in view. It became apparent that this was becoming an all encompassing experience: the town is alive, the hills become burned, and all of this is viewed between whispes of smoke and dilapidated trucks.

Its a whole lot of work to get one plate of beans. Fortunately the farmers minimum wage--usually supporting an entire family--of $2.50 a day keeps the prices down.