Help coming for small farmers

Initiatives are in the pipeline to ensure that all farmers, regardless of their financial standing, can make a meaningful contribution to the agricultural sector.

While she underscored the importance of high-tech solutions, Chief agricultural officer Keeley Holder today admitted that low-cost solutions were necessary to encourage participation in farming.

She said while there was still a place for high-end solutions, low-tech solutions would ensure small farmers with little capital could still contribute.

“Yes definitely there has to be a combination of both high-tech, high-cost solutions but the need for low-tech is also very important. We are a small country so it means that high-tech often comes with large costs. So we are working with the BADMC (Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation) to develop a rainfed agricultural programme which would look at being able to maximize lands on rainfed agriculture. This would reduce the cost of the need for infrastructure related to irrigation and also currently, because of our water issues, we would need to have systems like that in place.

“But there are also other types of low-tech solutions that we have been looking at, particularly because we understand that once you set up a high-tech system you must have a high level of skill so it will take time for small farmers to be able to develop that level of skill so we want to be able to provide a varying set of options where all persons who are keen and interested in farming as a profession can be able to participate in that regard,” Holder told the Standing Finance Committee discussing the Appropriation Bill, 2022.

Minister of Agriculture, Food and Nutritional Security, Indar Weir disclosed that the BADMC would soon be rolling out several initiatives aimed at helping small farmers.

“The paper that we are presenting to Cabinet on increased production speaks to using shade houses…and also we have at the BADMC, a small greenhouse that is commissioned to train people on how to grow in greenhouses. The cost of it once the person comes in under the FEED programme, the ministry through the BADMC actually carries the cost of getting them started and then through the Agricultural Development Fund where we have funds allocated for these types of initiatives. At the BADMC under the FEED programme we have facilities to train people and then of course, once they are wrapping up and going to scale they can be assisted,” he explained

Weir also revealed that 25 “basic” shade houses would be donated to Barbados by Guyana, while the ministry planned on purchasing another 25. (RB)