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In Cusco’s Urubamba Valley, under snow-capped peaks that seem to brush the clouds, farmers in Pisac still prepare their potato fields using the age-old chaki taklla, which long predated the use of ox power in Andean agriculture.
It is September and the residents of the village of Ampay prepare to celebrate the
time-honored custom of ayni, or shared work. To the strains of quena flutes and drums, wearing ponchos and woolen chullo caps, the villagers stream up the mountainside, shouldering their chaki takllas and carrying sacks of potato seed. They have also brought along jars of chicha, or maize beer, and the sacred coca leaves. These are essential elements in a ceremony in which the farmers ask the mountain gods for permission to begin sowing their crops.
At the beginning of the ceremony, the potatoes are sprinkled with chicha. A potato and a coca leaf are then chosen; they will be sown in a symbolic union. Everyone makes toasts and the villagers divide into groups of three. The men jump energetically onto their chaki takllas, sinking the blades into the earth. In each of the holes, one person drops a potato while the other adds sheep droppings as fertilizer. The sowing, done to the rhythm of the music, begins on the lowermost terrace and continues upward, one terrace at a time, until the entire area is planted.
When the sowing is finished, the women, or mamachas, serve heaping bowls of soup made with peas, olluco tubers, barley, maize, guinea pig, quinoa, and toasted maize kernels. The music spurs the revelers to launch into a traditional dance, and the rejoicing promises to last for hours.
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