Farmers are being told to encourage their children to get into agriculture.
Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agriculture Society (BAS) James Paul believes that farmers who are actively and deliberately pushing their children to venture in areas outside of the sector are doing their family businesses, legacies and agriculture in Barbados in general, a major disservice. During an interview on the sidelines of Agrofest 2022 at Queen’s Park, The City on Sunday, the final day of the two-day event, he painted a bleak picture for Barbados’ agriculture if this trend continues.
Paul explained that businesses stand a better chance of success in agriculture when they are managed by persons who have a history, who have brought you up, mentored and taught about the specifics in the field. He suggested it can’t be left up to the government alone to introduce young people to agriculture as a means of sustaining the sector and the island’s ability to feed itself.
“Stop pushing your children away from the business, agriculture is a business. If you have a dairy farm, stop telling your children don’t get involved. Let them get involved because at the end of the day if you are dead and gone along they have to carry on. Similarly, whether it be pigs, sheep, vegetables or whatever, people who are doing these things need to involve their children. That is the correct approach rather than trying sometimes to bring a chap who knows nothing about agriculture. He is going to go through some heartaches and pains, that is a fact of life,” he said.
Paul argued that the main reason why some farmers are discouraging their children’s involvement in the sector is because they present it as being less than another area and therefore they have tunnel vision about the true importance of the sector to Barbados. This viewpoint was especially daunting given the fact that Agrofest was reintroduced specifically to celebrate the farming community and highlight the value of agriculture to our lives and the island.
“There are families in Barbados who have sent all of their children to university based on the farm income. I can think of one farming family from St. George who basically educated their children just off farming. There is a chap who paid for his daughter’s university education in full in cash, yet he doesn’t want her to come back in agriculture. We’ve got to stop this foolish hypocrisy that we have in this country when it comes to agriculture.
“When you look at the United States and Europe, they have farming families because what they do is they encourage their children to get into farming. But what we are seeing now is we are going to have a lot of failure in agriculture because it is a learning curve which is relatively long and if you don’t have that type of experience it is going to take more than five years to create a real good farmer,” Paul maintained. (KC)
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