This is the final article in a series that we have been privileged to post here with the kind permission of the author. See links to previous articles below.

John Hedden

Reflections on agriculture and other pastimes.
The ironies of farming.

 What a thought.

What to do?

Farming of course, and to be specific earning a comfortable living from a farming plot intensively cultivated.

Cultivated with what? Coca? Indian hemp? Poppies? Neem? Other high value crops. A money tree? Maybe more mundane crops like rice  or perhaps potatoes. Possibly Noni even?

In reality folks, farming in the Bahamas right now is a thankless task, physically demanding, requiring a maximum of 4 hours sleep at night, knowledge of every skill under the sun; including book keeping, (not likely). And to top it all off, at the end of that 20 hour day you just can’t move your onions.

You see we don’t have that branding like ‘Vidalia’, or ‘sweet yellow’, or a label saying ‘imported’.  Though maybe — 'IMPORTED' from Andros –

So at the end of that very same day, not only are you dog tired, you are also dog broke. What better result could you ask for, broke and broken.

Farming in the Bahamas has never been a profitable business to be in. Look at the original Arawaks and Lucayans; they lived mainly off the sea which they never had to sow. They also lived off of the wild fruits and berries, herbs and coontie; none of which they had to sow. They never sold anything. In fact the only sale that took place was that of themselves by the white Europeans, who arrived, hoodwinked, and then transported them to Hispaniola to work in the mines and as pearl divers.

Following behind these native peoples came the early settlers who had to be sent emergency supplies by their US mainland compatriots in the Carolinas. This literally prevented them from starving to death in their new found islands of freedom.

Then after the US wars of independence an inundation of loyalists arrived with their plantations on their backs; or rather, on the backs of their slaves. This all under Crown encouragement, because Britain was convinced that if these lazy  Bahamian people were prepared to do a little bit of work then they could make a success of agriculture. That way they wouldn’t be doing all these pastimes of ill repute like drinking, and trading in illicit items, and prostitution and robbing the high seas, unless of course they were licenced by the Crown. What better way to build character than good solid back breaking work like turning rockland into farmland.

Well the plantation system didn’t work either, and the only thing remaining to this day is the ‘plantation mentality’ which of course is why we blame everything on colonialism, even though our children don’t have the foggiest idea of what that means. In fact I am not sure that they know what any thing means, except of course ‘more money’. So all the slaves got sold off or earned their freedom, or took their freedom because their masters were so destitute they couldn’t afford to keep them any longer.

So next in this saga came another wave of now liberated people trying to eke out a way of surviving on the very same land that broke their backs and the wallets of their masters. Of course it didn’t take long to realise that a life of drinking, trading, prostitution and arms and liquor running were much more profitable and less likely to lead to heat stroke, no matter what the Crown had to say about it.

Boating, and boat building were the means to survival for black and white Bahamians alike; and we forget today that some of our finest sailing boats came out of Andros, and other now forgotten islands. Also some of the world's finest sailors hailed from the Bahamas though never officially recognised. That, maybe because they weren’t recognised as officially English.

So they all went sponging. And we still do, but in these times, off the mainly North American tourists who visit our shores.

But I forget, I was talking about farming. So back to it. By the latter part of the nineteenth century the Bahamas was again pretty destitute. Cotton had failed miserably after a few years of good production in the more southern islands. Sisal never really took off, and labour was becoming expensive thanks to these liberated slaves, now called apprentices who wanted more money for the skills they offered. Sea faring won out again simply because it paid more money for regular work. But pineapples, and citrus became the vogue in a now wealthier North America. Europe was just too far away for the sugarloaf pineapple to arrive as a fruit instead of a fermenting juice. So these darned Bahamians discovered pineapple wine and how to make it. Happy times were here again. Well of course the new Americans in the US. discovered that they could grow pineapples in Hawaii, and citrus in California and Florida, being of course new parts of the United Republic, and sober. That quickly put paid to our meagre success of controlling the world markets for those few years. Taxes are the end of the world for farmers, and sure enough 1 cent per fruit killed us and the trade. So back to the party.

Well what better way to work the land, as the Crown still wanted us to, than to go away to farms in the US and work as migrant farm labour on the ‘contract’. At least we didn’t starve and our families back home received a portion of our wages in the original remittances, which are now a world wide major source of revenue for impoverished countries. Those males that did return from the contract were often given the label ‘American Boy’ which they then bore proudly on their persona.

Of course then the second world war took place and every piece of metal, and especially steel and iron, was removed from our shores for the war effort and the smelting pots of the arms factories of Britain. Destitute again.

At last the war was over and everybody throughout the colonies of British rule were trying to figure out how to make the price of bread, when lo and behold the colonial government arrives with this really bright idea of, what else but, farming. They sent teams to Andros and Eleuthera to establish projects for export produce to earn foreign revenue, and so help pay off some of that debt to America incurred during the war years.

So what happened? Well Andros attempted to grow export produce in the swamps behind Fresh Creek, and if it wasn’t for the rainy season the venture may have been successful. Also of course the Bahamians used to sneak off to the settlements and get drunk. These darned people never seem to learn.  And of course the pineapple growing areas of South Eleuthera were ploughed and worked by the new Caterpillar tractors so that these darned drunken farmers could at least try and put their plants in a straight line instead of weaving everywhere. But somewhere along the way the tractors eliminated the valuable winding red soils from the area, and never a pineapple was seen to grow here again.

Well after this the Colonials abandoned us to our drunken ways, and moved on to help other islands like Montserrat. Here they planted citrus trees on one side of the mountain, and built the packing sheds and processing plant on the other side. However they forgot to put a road in to connect the two. After this they pretty much gave up on the Caribbean as a sorry lot, and decided to move to the African countries to see what havoc they could wreak on that other side of the Atlantic ocean.

Still we didn’t give up and people like Levy came into Eleuthera and Crockett into Abaco. A succession of operators went into Andros. None were really successful long term farming operations, and I always think that we must have appealed to their philanthropic spirit in some way.  In fact to this day we still have our hand out begging from some rich sucker who passes our way.

And now we move into the modern era of information technology, tourism, and international banking. Still we keep our liquor sodden and pirating ways, and almost everybody to a soul is trying to figure out the easiest way to scam our neighbour. So much the better if they happen to be a foreigner.

What is the end result? It seems that our government has been catching up on colonial history, because they want us to go back into farming. What else???

Of course there are no incentives. Other countries offer subsidies and marketing, extension services and financing, insurance programmes and price guarantees.

But  Bahamian farmers don’t need any of these things. We get really encouraging words from those such as minister Cartwright proclaiming recently; I imagine after much deep thought.

“Bahamian farmers must become more competitive”.

'Nah it is much simpler and much more fun to go drinking, pirating, sponging, and prostituting ourselves'.

Bring on the Bachannal!

Links to previous articles follow

Click each highlighted link for the article.

Part One (1)
Part Two (2)
Part Three (3)
Part Four (4)
Part Five (5)
Part Six (6)

Mr. Hedden holds degrees in Botany from UWI Mona Campus and University of Reading UK and graduated from Government High School, Nassau, Bahamas. He has experience as a Horticulturalist for the USAID project BARTAD Andros, Horticulturalist for the Ministry of Agriculture at CAS (now GRAC), and then extension services. Mr. Hedden is now trying to establish a modern demonstration fruit and vegetable farm on 10 acres of 'crown' land. He presently lives on Abaco and has worked with farmers there for the last 25 years.