The Tribune

THE very word farming conjures up physical images. Words like honest labour, grit, sweat on the brow, God’s green earth. Its words are prayer-like -- praying for good weather and absence of insects that eat what you are growing before you can harvest it.

A lot of words, hard, backbreaking work, the most honourable way to make a living if you don’t mind getting up before the roosters crow and cows moo. A lot of words but in The Bahamas, popular wasn’t one of them.

After a half century, that is changing before our eyes. Bahamians are turning back to the soil and sea in ways we have not seen in decades. The president of the Abaco Chamber of Commerce is a farmer. The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries is a fisherman. A former state minister of finance and now radio host and UB division chair takes great pride in his backyard farm, sharing photos and seeds with friends. The immediate past prime minister, asked if he wanted to return to medical practice, said no, he wants to farm.

If tech was the wave of the last decade, backyard farming is the wave of the current.

It’s more than a fad. In the past few weeks, hundreds of persons have shown up to events organized by the Agricultural Development Organization in conjunction with the Church Commercial Farming Group to collect backyard farming kits in Abaco and Grand Bahama. More than 500 signed up in Grand Bahama, registering online in a matter of days after the site went live. Hundreds in New Providence have collected kits.

Farming is making a comeback and it can’t come back soon enough if we care about our health, our food security and our quality of life.

Back in 2015, Dr. Graham Cates, an authority on diabetes, pronounced The Bahamas as having the highest rate of pre-diabetes and diabetes per capita in the world. Even worse is our rate of heart disease. Dr. Duane Sands has been among those who continually point out that heart disease is the number one killer of Bahamians. Dr. Arlington Lightbourne, founder of Bahamas Wellness Health Systems, took up the formal study of wellness after years of practice in the emergency rooms of Doctors’ Hospital and PMH witnessing emergencies that were caused not by accidents but by lifestyle.

“I chose emergency room practice because I thought I’d be saving lives. It should have been the highest calling a doctor could reach for,” he said. “Instead, I was treating patients whose emergencies – heart attack, stroke, hypoglycemic shock – were the result of what they were consuming and how they were living, poor diet, too little exercise, in some cases, alcohol or other substance abuse. Our incidence of noncommunicable disease is unacceptable and we must find ways to learn wellness is not what we do at a single sitting, it is a way of life.”

The thing about farming is that it is not just what we do, either as a hobby or occupation. It makes a difference in how we live and feel, yet change in behaviour does not come easily. Rarely is there a seismic shift without a catalyst driving that change. In technology, it was Steve Jobs and the iPad and iPhone. In the reawakening of local farming, change started slowly with a group of 300+ churches organized by former President of the Christian Council Rev. Patrick Paul, but got the Steve Jobs-jolt when former Bahamas Feeding Network Executive Director Philip Smith came along with his newly-formed Agricultural Development Organization (ADO).

Smith, executive chairman of ADO, presented nearly $200,000 to the church group to secure a working partnership that would allow not only for the purchase of thousands of backyard farming kits but the hiring of enough field officers to ensure that those who wanted to plant would have a hand to guide them.

Philip Smith had been feeding people for 17 years, in the beginning, carrying warm loaves of home-baked bread out to waiting hands where the homeless slept or the needy hung out. For the last nine years, he headed Feeding Network. “I saw the hunger every day and it is so heartbreaking,” he says. “You can feed forever, but like the Bible says, if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish, he will eat so long as there are fish in the sea. I say if you teach a man or woman to fish or farm, they will feed themselves and their family and that’s what we are doing through ADO and the churches with partnership with Reverend Pat Paul, who is really getting it done.”

Smith is a relentless fund-raiser, every ounce of his energy poured into increasing food security. He often does not have a dollar in his pocket and lives on little more than faith. A quiet hero who shuns the recognition he deserves, he went from trying to help feed a nation to reminding us that if we grow what we eat and eat what we grow, we will not only reduce our $1.1 billion food import bill, but live healthier lives enriching our diet with the tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, limes, guava, spinach, avocados and more that we grow in our yards.

It often takes a single soul to jumpstart a movement that has been rumbling underground for a very long time. The pandemic that caught our food store, pharmacy and even baby formula shelves with their pants down as it hit the supply chain woke us up from the reverie that whatever we needed would be available when and where we needed. The slow resumption of availability brought with it an increase in prices that was a double whammy. Then we saw more suffering because attention to routine health matters and maintenance dropped off during the COVID lockdowns, restrictions and related fears of mingling or some medical offices not accepting routine visits. A lack of check-ups led to worsening conditions. Supply starvation, high prices, poor health results – a formula that a harbinger of change and along comes ADO and the relentless Philip Smith joining forces with the committed Rev. Pat Paul.

Together, the signs of a need for change and the people who were the driving forces behind it combined to help all of us find ourselves again not just with sand between our toes, but soil between our fingers and the fruits of our labour on our table.

Backyard farming is here, possibly the hottest new hobby in the country, and community farming is coming next.

Within months, we will see the first of several small holistic green markets. Thanks, Philip Smith and Rev. Pat Paul for reminding us that sometimes, the very best treasure can be found in our own backyard. All we have to do is till the soil.

A LOOK BACK AT AGRICULTURE IN AN UNLIKELY SOURCE – PAUL THOMPSON, POLICING THE BAHAMAS 1951 AND BEYOND

It’s the least likely place to find a discussion about agriculture but if you wanted to know how well The Bahamas fed itself before commercial farming in the Family Islands hit a wall, just pick up a copy of Paul Thompson’s latest book, Policing The Bahamas 1951 and Beyond. Thompson, you will recall, was a senior police superintendent who served on the Royal Bahamas Police Force for 30 years but to this day remains the voice of wisdom in policing that other officers and the public listen to.

There on pages 270-71 of the book that strays in places from law enforcement (as if Thompson just needed to share information he had been gathering) is a summary of the many farms that helped keep The Bahamas healthier.

From the pineapple plantation of South Eleuthera owned by the Bakers and Sawyers to the Hatchet Bay dairy, chicken and eggs farm that supplied New Providence, from US-based SML Farms operating in Andros and Abaco to the Abaco Sugar Cane Factory & Plantation to the canning of tomatoes in Cat Island, we were a farming nation.

Maybe Thompson included it in his treatise on policing because he felt its demise was criminal.