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“I talk to them during my watering mornings when I play a special tropical playlist on our Sonos. They’re like my kids — the only living things I have to be responsible for.”

Just beyond the greenhouses, millions of bees buzz through the tropical forest, supporting the ecosystem’s health and vitality.

In El Salvador, “the United States now has a tropical gulag,” said Regina Bateson, a political scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

They gather shortly after daybreak outside a minimarket, the tropical heat thickening, the dawn haze in lethargic retreat.

As Blackley says, much of the literature about raising cacao trees and then fermenting cacao is geared toward doing so in outdoor tropical climates.