
Making chocolates takes years of manual labour. Like most other agricultural crops, cacao must be closely monitored by farmers who regularly walk their fields and check for pests, moulds, and diseases that can potentially destroy a whole harvest. A farmer must spend three to five years caring for young cacao trees before they will produce their first fruit. Of the 100,000 flowers a tree might produce, only 10,000 will be naturally fertilised by midges. To increase this yield, farmers patiently pollinate these flowers using tiny brushes.
