Field notes from a maca harvest in the high Peruvian Andes

The Junín plateau sits above four thousand metres, where frost is a nightly event and the air holds little. Maca has been cultivated here since before the Inca, and the method has not changed much.

The hypocotyls are lifted by hand and left in the open for several weeks, freezing at night and thawing by day. Growers describe this as what makes the root usable; the chemistry supports them, since the drying period alters the constituent profile substantially.

Colour is sorted at harvest. Cream, red and black roots grow intermingled in the same field and are separated by hand afterwards, which is why phenotype-specific research is harder to conduct than it sounds.

We buy black maca by lot, recorded to the field and the harvest month.