Astrolabe

Clandestine Fields

Swidden agriculture in the Turks & Caicos Islands.

Story & Photos By B Naqqi Manco, TCI Naturalist

Visitors to the Turks & Caicos Islands: Try finding a traditional crop patch here — I dare you. It won’t be an easy, straightforward search. In countries with mechanized, technology-driven agriculture, farms are easy to recognise, even if they’re located in remote areas. Straight rows of single-variety crops, well-weeded and irrigated, on thoroughly ploughed soil, dashed by irrigation water and protected by fences — the breadbaskets of developed countries are usually very well-organised places.

It’s just waiting for harvest in the field — if the field can indeed be found!

It’s just waiting for harvest in the field — if the field can indeed be found!

Traditional Caicos Island crop patches — locally called “fields” — are not the geometric monocultures much of the world has come to expect from farms. Relying traditionally on swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture, Caicos Islands farmers have had to adapt methods for survival in the harsh environment, creating a unique though hard-to-recognise crop cultivation arrangement.

Dig down more than a few inches in most of TCI, and one hits bedrock. That bedrock is limestone — alkaline and drying to plant roots, porous and unable to support ponds or canals of fresh water for irrigation. With most of the rain falling in just a few months of the year, and very little of it falling in the coolest months when some crops grow best, neatly-rowed gardens just won’t do here.

Traditionally around April and May, Caicos Islands farmers will cut their fields. Using a cutlass (machete), brush, trees, and shrubs are slashed, leaving only the tree trunks in place on a plot anywhere up to several acres in size. This cut vegetation is strategically placed and allowed to dry, at which point it is set on fire around June, releasing nutritive ash into the soil. By then the hurricane-season rains are threatening to begin and it is time to plant. Caicos Island farmers use the same method that supported the Lucayan Indians for centuries in TCI — the “Three Sisters” method, where three crop species are planted together to help one another grow.

The first crops planted are maize, sweet potatoes, and bean vines along with pumpkin. The sweet potato and pumpkin vines form a dense blanket of ground-covering leaves, helping to choke out weeds and shade the bare soil from drying sun and wind, preserving precious moisture. The maize stalks provide climbing structures for the bean vines, which soon scramble up the remaining tree trunks too. The bean vines, using special bacteria-hosting root structures, fix nitrogen into the soil from the air, effectively fertilising the other crops. These crops are the “Three Sisters” of TCI, and crops planted later including okra, guinea-corn (sorghum), pigeon peas, cassava, and sugar cane.

Sweet potato vines in a second-year dry season field begin clambering up tree trunks killed in the original burning, replacing the bean vines that were present in the first year.

Sweet potato vines in a second-year dry season field begin clambering up tree trunks killed in the original burning, replacing the bean vines that were present in the first year.

Visiting Cuban crows drop papaya seeds that sprout into fast-growing trees. Banana, plantain, and pompone (a small, fat dessert banana) suckers are planted to fill in gaps. Tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, and callaloo are planted in the cooler months to provide table vegetables. None of these crops are planted in rows — they are put in wherever the soil is deep enough to contain their roots.

Bean and pumpkin vines scramble for light across other crop plants. Banana and cane stalks lean over lumps of twining sweet potato vines. Pigeon peas arch out, blooming red and yellow, while maize becomes all but lost in the show. The result is a tangled jungle of crops barely recognisable as deliberate cultivation — but it works exceptionally well.

A recent loss survey carried out after Tropical Storm Cristobal by the Department of Agriculture on North Caicos revealed the importance of this subsistence agriculture on the Caicos Islands. About one hundred individual farmers rely directly upon these fields for their families’ meals, and countless more depend on these farmers to sell their extra for local consumption. The intensity of the agriculture, without irrigation, pesticides, or fertilisers, depletes the soil in just a few years. When the last hauls of pigeon peas and cassava are pulled from the ground, the field is permitted to lie fallow until it reverts to limestone scrub. Another field patch is prepared to replace it in a new location.

At the Caicos Heritage House on the Museum’s campus in the Village at Grace Bay, I am developing such a traditional field where seasonal local crops are being grown adjacent to a garden of medicinal wild plants (bush medicine was often collected along the “field-roads,” agricultural access footpaths). While the aspect of burning has to be left out for practical reasons, the area will be otherwise authentic — and hopefully just as untidy as the genuine article.

This freshly slashed-and-burned field will be ready for planting as the first wet-season rains arrive in May. Though large trees are killed by the fire, the area will recover within several years.

This freshly slashed-and-burned field will be ready for planting as the first wet-season rains arrive in May. Though large trees are killed by the fire, the area will recover within several years.

Slash-and-burn agriculture gets a bad rap from ecologists, but when supporting a low population in an ecosystem that tolerates wildfire exceptionally well (some habitats, like the Caicos pine yard and fanner grass meadows, even require periodical burning to stay healthy), it is actually quite a workable system for subsistence farmers to use. It doesn’t lend itself to mechanization and industrialisation, but then neither does the geography of Caicos farmland. It’s not a showcase of food security — outsiders would be hard-pressed to identify a subsistence farm patch at a glance. A makeshift scarecrow (occasionally, doubling as a Guy Fawkes effigy!) and some charred stumps will reveal a farm patch though. There will be food under one’s feet, to one’s right and left, even over one’s head. . . .



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