Hurricane Maria worn out an estimated $780 million in agricultural worth in Puerto Rico. Hundreds of acres of espresso, banana and plantain farms have been flattened. However in areas the place small, subsistence-style farming has persevered, some crops survived, particularly the numerous root greens frequent in conventional Puerto Rican delicacies. Farmers dug up yuca, ñame and batata (cassava, yam and candy potato) and exchanged them for different items, or just gave them away. Fallen bananas and plantains have been collected off the bottom and bartered. Earlier than emergency meals provides from off the island might be delivered, an off-the-cuff economic system had emerged in some locations, based on Avilés-Vázquez. Folks gathered to prepare dinner and supplemented their meals with regionally grown meals.
A few of those that took half are engaged in a kind of farming known as agroecology. As practiced in Puerto Rico, agroecology typically includes polyculture, or rising totally different crops collectively; composting; limiting or eschewing artificial fertilizers and pesticides; and an emphasis on enhancing rural life. The guiding philosophy is to handle the farm as an ecosystem. Avilés-Vázquez factors to a famend agroecological farm known as El Josco Bravo to indicate how curiosity within the method has expanded. In 2014, it started providing a semester-long course in agroecology and obtained 60 purposes. This 12 months, it fielded 748.
Dalma Cartagena, a founding member of Organización Boricuá, a nonprofit devoted to preserving conventional farming methods, views the rising attraction of agroecology as an indication that the island is lastly coming to its senses. She grew up on her grandfather’s farm within the Sixties. As she remembers these days, nobody had costly belongings, and folks labored arduous, however everybody ate effectively, nourished by the meals that got here from their small plots of land. Neighbors shared no matter they produced. “It was a means of being that was self-sufficient,” she says. “There was a tradition of mutual assist that wasn’t essentially in {dollars} and cents.” Cartagena doesn’t wish to cast off trendy, industrial agriculture, however she desires to see the virtues of that earlier period revived.
Some agroecological practices could assist make Puerto Rico’s farms extra resilient to hurricanes. Because the world warms, the conundrum dealing with farmers all over the place is methods to face up to the storms, droughts, warmth waves and floods which might be changing into ever extra excessive. The solutions will differ relying on the panorama. The challenges of farming the semiarid plains of Kansas should not the identical as these dealing with farmers within the hilly and tropical inside of Puerto Rico. However there may be one broadly relevant suggestion, based on John Reganold, a professor of soil science and agroecology at Washington State College: Enhance natural matter within the soil. This natural matter, the residue that dwelling issues go away within the dust, can come from useless crops, root exudates, microbes, fungi, manure, even decomposing animals and bugs. It is necessary, Reganold advised me, as a result of it each gives “construction” that helps water infiltrate the soil (as a substitute of washing away) and acts as a sponge, holding onto vital plant vitamins and storing water for dry durations. Usually, the extra natural matter there may be in soil, the much less the necessity for fertilizer.