La Cabrita is a real family farm. Guicella Igreda Lix (40) and her father Don Manuel (80) manage the goat breeding and forage cultivation together.
Guicella’s mother, brother and two sisters are responsible for pigs, poultry and the dairy and cheese plant. La Cabrita’s products have gained international organic certification, a big success for a small farm of just 2.5 hectares on some rocky slopes in Cerro Puquio, in the arid coastal zone northeast of Lima, Peru.
When the family started in 1998, they had almost nothing and invested little by little. They managed to overcome, without any outside help, the theft of the capital from the sale of their house, but the fire at the dairy plant two years later was more difficult, as Guicella explains. “We had tried and succeeded building our farm without becoming dependant on others.
We didn’t want debts at the bank. But after the fire we were compelled to ask for a loan”. They got the loan, repayable over two years, from a local NGO with a microcredit programme. Guicella is positive about the NGO: “The interest rate is similar to commercial banks, but not the requirements. The NGO knows us and the way we work, they have confidence in us”.
The Igreda family doesn’t need larger loans though: “The stress of being in debt would make us forget the small things. We have a philosophy of slow growth, for us that is the crucial point of sustainability.”
Text: Mireille Vermeulen
