Eugene entrepreneur brings fresh Ugandan vanilla to Oregon 

David Laker grew up in a war zone. 

For much of his childhood in Gulu, a small city in northern Uganda, the civil war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army meant violence and forced separation for children and their families. He was sent away to boarding school for elementary school and high school, a luxury which many families could not afford. 

His grandmother, Mary Ayaa p’Okot, ran the nursing program at the local hospital and his grandfather, Okot p’Bitek, was a renowned author and poet known for the 1966 publication “Song of Lawino.”

During elementary school, Laker (pronounced La-kay), was separated from his parents for nearly a year because of the war. He was safer in the Catholic school with the nuns than at home while fighting consumed the region.

The oldest of nine siblings, Laker, now 45 and living in Eugene, paid his way through school by laying bricks during breaks to raise money for tuition. He graduated with a degree in political science from Makerere University in Kampala in 2003, then returned to Gulu as the war was finally winding down. 

His community, and cousins from his own family, were shattered. 

“We have adults who lost entire families,” Laker said. “We have orphaned children. I have relatives who have been maimed.”

After school, Laker wondered what career path he should take. He rented a house and looked for work. Then, a 14-year-old cousin who had been abducted and forced to serve as a child soldier asked to stay with Laker while he recovered. Soon, other former child soldiers started showing up.

“His friends and other friends came,” Laker said. “I started playing soccer, so these guys would come and play with me, just to give them some kind of place to be.”

Looking for answers

Local leaders began to question why Laker was “harboring” these young people, some of whom had been forced to commit violence against their own families. He checked with nonprofits who were helping with reintegration, but was told the groups couldn’t help once the children left the programs. 

“No one had the answers,” Laker said. “So that’s when I started working with them.”

For nearly a decade, from 2001 to 2009, Laker ran a reintegration program for the former child soldiers. He worked with existing nonprofits that were set up in the Gulu area, such as UNICEF and Save the Children, and helped establish three homes for the traumatized youth, along with a school and a high school, which are still in operation.

His work caught the attention of researchers from the University of Minnesota, who wanted to study aggression in children affected by war. Laker was skeptical of the outsiders who wanted to come to his country, collect data for their papers, and then return to advance their careers and leave nothing for the community. But he negotiated: If they helped him attend graduate school in the U.S., he would help them with their research.

In 2008, Laker moved to Minnesota to pursue a master’s degree in comparative education and international development. After earning his degree, he returned to Uganda and continued his work.

“Culturally, life here was strange for me,” Laker said. “And Minnesota was too cold.”

Still, at a professor’s request, he returned to Minnesota to do some more research. This time, he stayed. He settled in Eugene and worked as a supervisor at the Department of Human Services for a decade, where he dealt daily with mental health issues and drug abuse. The pandemic made everything worse.

“It got to a point where I had to pause and think about what I was doing,” he said. “After doing my work with the state, I decided that maybe it’s time to do something else.”

The vanilla connection

A planned 2020 trip back to Uganda to visit his family was delayed by the pandemic. When he made it there in 2022, an opportunity arose that changed his life trajectory.

Uganda endured one of the world’s longest COVID-19 shutdowns, at two years. Kids attended school during the shutdown over radio. Almost nothing was entering or leaving the country’s borders, and vanilla farmers in the rugged, mountainous western region were sitting on stockpiles of premium vanilla beans.

“All the farmers talked about was having no markets for their vanilla,” Laker said. “They had piles sitting at their homesteads because there’s nowhere to sell. Yet that’s their income — what sends their kids to school.”

When Laker visited his brother, Bitek Opii Jibidayo, in western Uganda, he discovered the full extent of the problem, including limited market access during the shutdown, and the nearly impossible logistics of getting product to the markets that did exist. 

Uganda, roughly the same geographic size as Oregon but with a population of 50 million, compared with Oregon’s 4 million, relies heavily on subsistence farming. The mountainous western region where vanilla grows presents significant transportation challenges.

“The roads are bad. It’s rugged terrain,” Laker said. “Small-scale farmers don’t have any means of transportation.”

Jibidayo runs a well-drilling business in the region and had been helping farmers transport their crops using his truck.

“Because of my brother’s business, he has a truck which was readily available,” Laker said. “Then it was just good timing, and he would help some of the farmers take their stuff to the markets.”

Back in Eugene, Laker began making calls and figuring out the paperwork and required product testing to establish an import process. Uganda has two harvest seasons, May to June, and October through December. Laker imports the vanilla after harvest. 

Now, through his business Hive on I-5 Organics, he can have fresh Ugandan vanilla in Eugene within three weeks of placing an order.

The vanilla crop

Vanilla planifolia is a vine in the orchid family. It is the only orchid that produces a valuable crop. Vanilla thrives in tropical climates with high humidity, with Madagascar and Indonesia being the two top producers. It takes 2 1/2 to 4 years to get beans once a vine is planted. 

And getting those beans is one of agriculture’s most demanding processes, because each flower, which opens for just one day, must be hand-pollinated. The vanilla beans ripen at different times and require up to nine months to mature. The curing and drying process can take another six months.

Ugandan beans are the Bourbon type, though the term has nothing to do with the alcoholic beverage. Instead, it references the French Bourbons who once controlled the prime vanilla-growing region of Madagascar. Bourbon vanilla is the most common, so if you’ve eaten vanilla ice cream, you know that sweet and floral flavor.

Vanilla beans are graded by size and moisture content, with Grade A beans typically 6 inches or longer with a high moisture content, which helps deliver the rich vanilla flavor. Grade B beans are thinner and drier. Hive on I-5’s vanilla is Grade A Bourbon-type. 

“When you touch vanilla with your bare hand, you should be able to smell it,” Laker said. “If you cannot, something’s wrong.”

Laker sells a three-bean package for $10. He’s working with Oregon State University’s food science center to develop vanilla paste and powder.

The tradition of beekeeping 

Beekeeping is a traditional practice in Uganda, and Laker grew up keeping bees and managing them using no protective gear. As a child between 8 and 12 years old, he was taken to harvest honey and had to hold the bowl without dropping it, even when stung, as a test of composure and training. 

He’s taking his modern knowledge of beekeeping back to Uganda, where it is common to harvest from wild hives or from hives made out of cut logs or tree bark. Laker had Ugandan carpenters build standard beehive boxes, and he shipped over suits and gloves. Now, about 45 hives operate across different farms, with local schools taking students on field trips to see them.

While vanilla orchids require hand pollination, Laker saw an opportunity to introduce beekeeping to the farms for other benefits. The bees help pollinate companion crops grown alongside the vanilla, and the farmers get the advantage of having honey to sell as well.

“They’re excited now, it’s something new to them,” Laker said. 

He keeps bees in his Eugene yard, harvesting about 300 pounds of honey annually, which is mostly for personal use. 

“I just love it,” he said. “I can watch bees all day long.”