Theft of Blackbelly sheep leaves farmer reeling emotionally and financially

What started off as a typical day on the farm for Jabaree Grant ended in a heart-wrenching experience – the discovery of stolen Blackbelly sheep, accounting for more than $8 500 in losses.

When a Barbados TODAY team visited the visibly distraught 31-year-old farmer on Friday, he said he was too distressed to speak. All he could manage to say at the time was: “It’s painful, disheartening and upsetting. You work so hard, then for something like this to happen, it’s hurtful. This is how I feed my family. This is how I send to school my two children.”

When Grant first visited his River Plantation, St Philip farm around 8 a.m., he did not realise that a substantial amount of his flock was missing.

After opening the front gate for his farmhand Rajkumar Persaud, he went to run some errands and when he returned about four hours later, he got the dreadful news. Persaud told him that 22 of his 89 sheep were gone.

Recalling what happened, Persaud said: “I let out the sheep in the pasture to graze, and about an hour and a half later, the sheep came back in and I said it was very strange. So I realise about three or four mothers running around the pens hollering and looking for their young ones.

“I figured that the young ones must have been left in the pasture, so I got some feed and run them all back in the pen. We had a count of the sheep. They were 89 – 18 rams, ten [lambs] and the remainder in ewes. After I looked around in the pen, I realised there were only five young ones. So I looked around the farm.”

Persaud said he could not find the missing lambs and that triggered the alarm. He did a count and realised the tally was only 67.

“So when [Grant] came, we looked around to find the sheep. We discovered that a part of the fence was down. We figured that that is where they (the thieves) used as an entrance to bring out the sheep. We investigated further. When we went on the hill, we saw that a vehicle had come across there based on the impressions across the roadside curb. I told him to make a report at the station,” he added.

Persaud said it was a major loss for the farm as Grant had incurred several thousand dollars in losses.

“It’s five lambs; you can’t really quantify them. But when you multiply 17 adult sheep by $500, you can do the maths and see the losses. And that is just a rough estimate because some of the ewes were pregnant. It is a great loss to the farm. Don’t talk about the money you pay in feed. We doing about 20-something bags just for the pigs and chickens alone, then you have to factor in the labour cost, the water bill and the annual cost of the rent. So sometimes in farming when you put pen to paper, people say let ‘we done with that’ and shut shop. Right now, this is just hurting the farm; it hurting the farm.

“As a crop farmer, I too can relate. My farm is nearby and I had melon theft there Monday and Friday last week, so praedial larceny in Barbados is growing rapidly,” Persaud said.

He said Grant would have to invest in security measures to prevent a recurrence.

“I told him that the praedial larceny got you in a state where you have to invest unnecessary money to erect lights and bring in cameras. So this is very frustrating, and I don’t see that the theft in Barbados will stop. As the [police] officer just told him, he is going to have to watch the area at night. So tell me how much night rest you going to lose doing that?” Persaud said.

Meanwhile, Grant indicated that despite the theft, he would not give up his passion for farming. He said he got involved in the industry five years ago because of the bond he developed with his father Maurice Grant.

After speaking with Barbados TODAY, Grant and Persaud followed the police officers who had visited the farm, to District ‘C’ Police Station in Station Hill, St Philip and gave a statement.

The incident was also reported to the Barbados Agricultural Society.

sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb