Veteran St Lucy farmer Sam Holder is calling on authorities to move swiftly to implement adequate rainwater harvesting systems in the rural parish.
Following heavy rainfall that drenched the island on the weekend, he told Barbados TODAY he was upset that the majority of the water in the northern parish was allowed to run back into the sea because of inadequate rainwater harvesting systems.
Holder said dams to suppress flooding in major farming areas and catch water that farmers can utilise during drought periods, were needed.
“What I would like to see done is instead of allowing this kind of water to waste, the authorities truly do something about it. You can imagine the kind of rain that fell between Friday and [Sunday], and the authorities had given us the dams that they had promised us for the longest time, the amount of water you would harvest? You would have water to run you for at least the rest of the year. You wouldn’t even have to worry about wells,” he contended.
The farmer, who has been involved in the sector for more than 30 years, lamented that successive governments failed to follow through with their promises to put dams in the area.
“For the longest time, they promised . . . additional wells, and they changed it and talked about giving us dams, and they haven’t done one single thing, and that is what is annoying me. This amount of water has no right continuously going to the sea when we can be using it. It is being wasted. I have some zucchini and some finger squash close to the area, and at least about ten to 15 feet of the end part would have been disrupted by this water that comes through, so I can see the water line,” Holder said.
“Now it means that at some point in time when the water came down through there, it would have been something looking at probably a foot and a half to two feet high. This means good water went down through here, and all of that water just went down to the sea. That is good water that just went to waste, and we keep asking and begging for it all the time.”
Barbados TODAY’s efforts to contact the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir to get a comment on the issue were unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Northern Zone Coordinator for the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC) Nicole Rollins said while farmers welcomed the rainfall, the flash flooding would have affected some of them in different ways.
She said water trucks which provide some of the farms with irrigation were unable to reach them because cart roads were impassable due to residue.
“Remember, the water trucks have something like 20 000 pounds of weight from the water, so if that truck goes through there now, forget it. When we get this sort of rain, I would tell them not to come for at least three to four days because it doesn’t make any sense to damage a truck, and we always have to think about people’s safety,” Rollins explained.
“We had so much rain in such a short space of time, so it was kind of difficult. We are just hoping for a few days of sunshine so we can get back to some sense of normalcy. If it stays wet for too long, some of their crops are going to be gone. I know quite a few farmers are planting now, not necessarily harvesting at this time.”
Edward Gibson of Northview Farms, who had to rescue piglets from a flooded pen, also called on relevant authorities to clear a nearby blocked watercourse which resulted in thousands of gallons of water rushing through his pig and poultry farm.
He said if the watercourse was clear, the water would have run off.
“We need the drains digging back out so that the water can run and go along through the gully up to River Bay. The watercourse has been blocked for a little while now, and I had already spoken to someone, but [Sunday] now is when it really came down. Lucky enough for me, I was in the pens, and I was able to transfer my smaller pigs to higher ground,” Gibson said.
