Planting & harvesting

Blue agave is rarely grown from seed. Instead, each mature plant produces offshoots around its base, called hijuelos or pups, from about its fifth year. Farmers dig these up when they are around a year old and replant them in rows, usually just before the rainy season, which runs from June to September.

Because every pup is a clone of its mother, a field of blue agave is genetically almost identical. That keeps the crop consistent, but it also leaves it vulnerable: a disease or pest that suits one plant suits them all. Researchers have warned for years that this monoculture puts the wider genetic diversity of agave at risk.

The blight

That risk became real when planting went industrial at the end of the 1980s. Growers began to see a complex of diseases and pests known as TMA, from the Spanish for “wilting and death of agave”. Through the 1990s, Fusarium fungi and Erwinia bacteria rotted plants from the inside, and the agave weevil spread with them. With every plant a clone of the next, there was no natural resistance to slow it down.

A hard frost in 1997 then killed millions of young plants. Because agave takes the best part of a decade to mature, the damage only showed years later, as a severe shortage around 2000 to 2002. Distillers paid up to $100 for a single piña. Big producers rented land to plant their own, some premium brands raised their prices, and others stretched their supply by switching to mixto, which only needs 51% agave sugars.

Boom and bust

Shortages lead farmers to plant, and a decade later the fields all mature at once. By 2008 agave was so cheap, around 2 cents a pound, that some fields were not worth harvesting and farmers turned to corn and beans instead, setting up the next shortage. This roughly ten-year cycle of scarcity and glut has run through the industry ever since, and it is one reason the price of a bottle of 100% agave tequila can swing so much.

Years in the field

A blue agave needs 8 to 12 years to mature, depending on soil, climate and how it is cultivated. Through all that time it has to be weeded, the soil worked and pests controlled, and almost all of that work is still done by hand. Since each plant is harvested only once, a grower is effectively planting for a decade ahead.

The jimador

Harvesting is the job of the jimador, a skilled field worker who judges when each plant is ready. Using a coa, a long-handled tool with a flat, rounded blade, the jimador cuts the plant from its roots and slices away its 200 or so leaves, leaving only the heart, the piña, named for its resemblance to a pineapple.

Piñas vary a lot in size. Most weigh between 35 and 60 kg, though highland agave can produce hearts well over 100 kg. As a rough guide, it takes about 7 kg of agave to make one litre of tequila.