Saturday morning was bright and mostly sunny in Paraquita Bay, but farmer Laura Dore said the weather has not been terribly cooperative for agriculture in recent weeks.
“The weather is against me right now,” she said, “So things going down and it’s hard to grow.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Dore managed to host a table selling her produce over the weekend at the Agriculture and Fisheries Exhibition and Market.
She was among about a dozen vendors on the first day (March 8) of the two-day event, which officially kicked off a series of activities to be held throughout the territory during Agriculture and Fisheries Month.
Under one tent, farmer Arona Fahie-Forbes was surrounded by flowers she grew for sale. Under another, Adina Penn’s strawcraft was on display while she chatted with Communications and Works Minister Kye Rymer, who had left his formal attire at home.
Ms. Dore’s table featured a pile of long green vegetables covered in bumps. The cucumber-like ampalaya, also known as bitter melon, originated in southeast Asia, she said.
“Generally, we in the Caribbean use [ampalaya] as well,” she added. “So I grew up using it for things like saltfish.”
To prepare the vegetable, people often soak slices in saltwater to remove the bitterness before sauteing them with aromatics, Ms. Dore said.
“Or you can boil it in salt water,” she added. “But then you squeeze it and sauté it with onions, with whatever vegetables you want.”
Ms. Dore said business had been slow on Saturday morning, and she was hoping it would pick up in the afternoon.
But after the two-day fair, First District Representative Karl Dawson, who served as agriculture and fisheries junior minister before a government shake-up on Tuesday morning, acknowledged that the weekend was slower than he had hoped despite many positive notes.
“There was a measure of success. A measure of success,” he said. “Certainly, we’ll work more closely with the farmers and fishers to ensure that there’ll be greater turnout in the future.”
Fishing
He added that the month’s activities will also focus on the territory’s waters.
“We can clearly say that we have not yet exploited the greatest benefits out of our fishing sector,” Mr. Dawson told the Beacon March 11. “So it’s something that we continue to work at and something that we are trying to ensure that we can get the most out of for our fishing sector.”
In keeping with that approach, the month’s theme is “Limited Land, Vast Ocean: Reimagining Food Production Through Ingenuity.”
“On the limited land, it means then that we just have to be more strategic and efficient in our farming; try to ensure that we have more high-yielding types of farming,” Mr. Dawson said.
In response to a changing climate, he added, his ministry would like to see more resilient types of farming as well.
“While there’s less land available, we are trying to make more land available to farmers,” he said.
Mr. Dawson also stressed the importance of exposing the younger generation to fishing and aquaculture as well as agriculture.
“We want to make sure that we encourage younger persons and so on into the field so we can get the most out of both land and sea, even though we have far more sea than land,” he said.
He added that technology could inform the next steps forward.
“More than 50 percent of the fish seafood produced now is actually done in some farm-raising, aquaculture-type environment,” Mr. Dawson said. “So it’s not an area we can ignore.”
The month’s activities will move to Virgin Gorda on Saturday for another exhibition and market, then to Anegada on March 26 and Jost Van Dyke on March 29.
