Stephan Schwab

Welcome to the first post on this blog. This blog has just been created so it hasn’t any content yet – except this first post. It will however tell the story of our quest to establish a farm in and close to the rainforest in the Republic of Panama.

You may wonder “so who is ‘we’?” and why a farm in the middle of the jungle. The “we” part is easily explained. My name is Stephan Schwab and I am not a farmer by trade neither Panamanian. I am a software development consultant and I was born in Germany. My family and I haved traveled extensively in Europe and elsewhere and finally moved to Panama after spending some time in Florida, USA, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. We were looking for a nice place to live in Central America close to the U.S.. In the end we chose Panama over Costa Rica due to the better availability of telecommunications services. In Costa Rica one may have to wait about 4 years for a simple phone line and for good Internet service it may be worse. I don’t know how it is today in Costa Rica but by the time of our field research there, which is now about 6 years ago, it was difficult. So we ended up in Panama and are feeling well in our new host country.

Last year we started pondering the idea of becoming farmers as a side business. We had moved from Panama City to a more or less rural area and seeing all the subsistence farming around us it got us thinking. At first we thought about buying some small piece of land, build a house there and start something moderate such as raising sheep or goats.

So we set out to look around. After talking to many people and looking at a lot of properties we finally got introduced to someone in the Chepo region east of Panama City. The place we visited and fell in love with is about 3 hours away from where we just moved. We need about 1 and half hour to drive to the city and then to get to Chepo we have to cross the whole city and finally go another hour to reach the place. Before… Imagine … Crossing two rivers and finally get on horses to reach the property. This is quite an adventure and I plan taking you along for the ride.