Sustainable farming in the U.S. Virgin Islands recovering with the help of North Mississippi natives
Nate Olive watched till nightfall as Hurricane Maria rolled in over the west end of St. Croix Island. He said goodnight to his sown tropical paradise of fruit orchards and vegetable fields, pastures of sheep and guest-hosting cabanas. As the winds of the storm began howling like a freight train, he descended into the on-site hurricane shelter.
He had been on this property, now the Ridge to Reef farm, for over 13 years managing farm outreach and educational programs as part of the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farming Institute until he purchased the land himself. His farm helped introduce the concept of a community supported agriculture program, or CSA, to the territory in 2010. Their CSA has since has grown to include over 400 members and encouraged four other farms on the island to take up similar practices. Typically joined by six to 10 staff members on the farm, Olive and two other staffers and a visiting couple were on the property when Maria struck.
Maria came in the middle of one of the heaviest hurricane seasons in recent history, according to the National Weather Service.
“Maria gradually intensified and became the 8th hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season with 75 mph maximum sustained winds,” the NWS said. Following other destructive storms like Harvey, which battered the Texas coast and Irma, which also made landfall in the caribbean islands, Maria would prove to be a further blow to an already damaged, and oft forgotten section of United States territory.
“Every little detail was brown”
Olive had ridden out other storms on the farm before, like hurricane Omar in 2010, but nothing had prepared him for cracking the doors of the bunker open the next morning and coming out into a completely different world. “It definitely looked like a war zone,” Olive said. “Every little detail was brown.”
Olive’s thoughts quickly turned to rounding up sheep and donkey that roamed the property. He found them tangled between trees. He was surprised to find his own home dinged, but relatively untouched.
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&schema=facebook&url=https%3A//www.facebook.com/n8olive/videos/10107745935430150/&image=https%3A//i.embed.ly/1/image%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fscontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net%252Fv%252Ft15.0-10%252Fp75x225%252F22012503_10107745948663630_1810292800747470848_n.jpg%253Foh%253Dfbf3906dff3cdbff2b90234d539e6ffc%2526oe%253D5A8E4D4C%26key%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07First footage of Ridge to Reef farm after Hurricane Maria of farm workers recovering donkeys. Video courtesy of Nate Olive.
Yet he was severed from the outside world: the solar panels that powered the property lay crushed, and cell service was a rarity. Olive can travel to a certain hill on the island where he gets service to send out text messages and place calls. There was a place where he had internet that he could go to every two or three days and it was there that he posted Facebook updates and replied to those who had reached out to help.
Their crew of four would spend four days cutting half a mile up the drive to the main road, only to find the street itself impassable.
Before this land was a jumbled mess, it was a 180 acre functioning farm, a tropical agro-tourism destination and a place of inspiration for Como, Mississippi farmer Marshall Bartlett.
“They planted lots of native species and there are tons of trees,” Bartlett remembered, “They built these really neat structures like cool treehouses.” Ridge to Reef was also selling to the farm-to-school program under contract with the local school system.
The first time Bartlett came to the farm he was seeking a reprieve from a cold winter semester at Dartmouth, opting to take an eight-week apprenticeship at the then-Virgin Island Sustainable Farming Institute in St. Croix. He credited this time as formative in the creation of his own Home Place Pastures.
“There were several people from multigenerational row crop farms in the south trying to figure out what to do with their place and move their farm, and how they sell agriculture in general,” Bartlett said. They discussed building their farms as places to engage their communities that had seen a decline in jobs and access to healthy foods.
“I was only 19 so it definitely stuck with me and that’s where I sort of started to form the idea to come back and do what I’m doing now,” he explained. During his stay there he also learned green building techniques and animal husbandry practices that he employs at his own farm.
“When I saw pictures of the farm after the hurricane it looked like somebody went with a chainsaw and cut everything two feet above the ground,” he said. Due to the strong impact this farm has had on his own career, he reached out to the Ridge to Reef Farm via email, but his attempts were futile as the island is still mostly without internet service.
Once they finally got in touch the team hit the road on November 8th, trucking down to New Orleans to stay the night at the home of their NOLA sales representative before catching a 6 a.m. flight to St. Croix.
Team member and Home Place Pastures Chief of Operations Andy Stubblefield said the destruction was evident even from the air.
“They have all these FEMA tarps that they put over damaged roofs, and when you fly in you can see that pretty much every house had one of those tarps on top of it,” he said.
The airport, which had been the focus of most of the relief efforts, was in the best shape, but once the crew began to drive out into the country and up the mountain that the farm was on they began to notice demolished homes and downed power lines.
“You can’t rent a car there, all of the lines are down, all of the infrastructure of the island is just gone,” Bartlett explained.
He had returned not to the sunny shores of his youth, but to an island two months post-hurricane, struggling to return to normalcy. Gone was the local sleepy bar on the beach that he and his fellow farmers would hitch-hike to at sunset.
“A lot of the beaches you can’t swim in right now because the sewage system had flooded and there’s contamination in the water,” Barlett lamented.
The team members were housed not in tropical resorts, but the screened-in cabanas that had slept guests at the farm before the storm. The cabanas were still without electricity and running water when the team arrived.
“We weren’t expecting anything glamorous, we were down there to work,” Stubblefield explained.
Mother nature has seemed to recover more quickly than her children on the island. The brownness that covered everything began to flow across the property as heavy rainfall and flooding continued even after Maria had passed. Saturated farm soil no longer imposed by tree roots began to cover the roads like rivers.
There’s grass now. The deep muddiness from the rain has rendered swampy stalks ten feet tall. Bush cloaking debris on the ground, vines encasing downed trees. Vegetable crops sit ruined and rotting in the fields, munched on by stray animals.
What equipment the farm had has been put through the blender. Mowers were blown out hitting hidden shrapnel from the storm in the seeping weeds. The farm had a tractor, but it was in the shop during the hurricane. The shop was blown off the map and the mechanic was evacuated out for dialysis.
For Olive, the Home Place Pastures team would be a skilled set of hands and a boost in morale for his operation.
Bartlett and his team consisting of Stubblefield, marketing head John Jordan Procter, CSA organizer Alison Schruder and farm intern Andrew added hands where needed.
“Fruit trees from the CSA had been tipped over, and that was one of the big projects we had one day, going to each tree and pruning them and trying to push them up and support them with other trees so that they had a chance to survive and continue to produce fruit,” Stubblefield said.
The team also worked to repair grazing pasture enclosures that had be crushed by fallen trees. They worked sun-up to sun-down chainsawing trees, making burn piles, carrying trees through the brush and doing fence work.
Stubblefield said he was most impacted by seeing the affect that Ridge to Reef had on the island community. “Pretty much everywhere we went the people knew the farm and were very appreciative of us coming there and helping out,” he said.
Olive said Bartlett was well suited to the task because of his background in farming, and his team of skilled and willing workers. “I had never met anyone else on his team in my life, but we all bonded instantly when they saw what we are up against,” Olive said.
The team was a welcome antidote, but not a full cure. While other visits from farm supporters are in the works, healing the land isn’t Olive’s sole concern. Mortgage payments, phone bills, health insurance payments are all still due, storm or no storm. On top of that, he’s having to replace broken equipment just to get the business started again. Farming is about patience. Planning, timing, sticking to your task until it’s done, but the farm is not even in the position to plant.
According to FEMA, 6,352 individual assistance applications have been approved and $105, 405, 080 in public assistance grants have been obligated. However, farms like Ridge to Reef make too much gross income to apply for such federal assistance, mostly aimed for individuals and family households. General loans are hard to come by because of the farm’s low net profit. The island is operating on a mostly cash-only basis, which is difficult in a place without internet service for ATMs.
“The best solutions I’ve seen aren’t institutional help but individual help,” Olive said, “It’s not federal it’s just people helping people, no strings attached.”
The farm has been mailed supplies from friends across the country. There is a GoFundMe started to raise money for a tractor. He says as much as the storm surge shocked him, he is equally overwhelmed at knowing how much support he has from people, even those he hasn’t been close to in years.
“I didn’t really know that we did something good for them at some point in their lives,” Olive said. He’s got a long road ahead of rebuilding sheds and greenhouses, and getting the farm back to sustainability.
“A storm like that just effects every little detail. It just twists and bends and breaks every corner of everything,” he said. “All you can do is pick one thing and do it till it’s done. If you try to think of the whole list at once it will drive you crazy.”
Olivia Lea Morgan Sax 
