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Being a woman farmer in Puerto Rico is a beautiful thing. I am not a woman farmer, but I’ve spent the last three months meeting women across the island who are leading farming initiatives ranging from Ayurvedic farming and permaculture, to aquaponics and indoor vertical farming, to bee conservatories and urban gardens, to an agroecology collective.
Through their efforts, these women are not only shortening the distance food travels to get to people on the island—a great feat considering Puerto Rico imports 85% of its food—they’re creating jobs, providing educational experiences, building community, and protecting the land. Please meet Jey Ma Tulasi, Isabelle Ramseyer, Lisa Jander, and Stephanie Monserrate.
In the countryside of Hatill0, Puerto Rico, Ayurvedic farmer, Jey Ma Tulasi wakes up with the sun and meditates. Before she steps foot on Finca Pajuil, her 14-acre permaculture farm, she does her Dinacharya, an Ayurvedic daily routine to support optimal wellness. After working with the morning sun, she holds community lunches, serving food from the farm’s harvest, and providing herbal training and educational activities in the afternoon.
After studying Ayurvedic herbalism in India, Jey Ma saw that all the plants revered as healers were growing on the farm in Puerto Rico. “Ayurveda and our local botanical traditions are pretty much the same, at least the tropical Ayurvedic practices,” says Jey Ma. “So I was able to pretty much coin the term Ayurican, meaning Ayurvedic-Puerto Rican.
Mixing ancient wisdom with modern techniques, such as aquaponics, Jey Ma keeps permaculture practices front and center. “Permaculture is regarding the area where you’re growing and focusing on growing plants that are native or naturalized, and do well in their own environment—not going against nature,” she says. “It’s vernacular actions. You definitely foster the ecosystem that you’re in, so the birds and the bees can come in, the different elements from the micro to the macro.”
We all need to let the bees come in. We all need to save the bees, as they pollinate 80% of the world’s plants including 90 different food crops. In fact, one out of every three or four bites of food you eat are possible because of bees.
Earth’s Greatest Pollinators
Saving bees has evolved into a top priority for Isabelle Ramseyer, a rising senior at Saint John’s High School in Condado. After noticing a number of bees flying around her apartment with nowhere to go and no food to eat, due to the destruction of agriculture and vegetation during Hurricane Maria, she made it her mission to help save the bees with the launch of her student-led Be a Bee initiative in 2018.
“When I started the program I said, ‘let’s start with helping the bees agriculturally, but also let’s teach the youth about the importance of bees, because when a student or a little kid is talking about bees and is all excited usually the parent gets interested and becomes a part of that process, as well.”
In addition to raising enough money to build and install two observational bee hives in classrooms, and manufacturing honey-based products that are sold with 100% of the proceeds going to the Saint John’s High School scholarship fund, the Be a Bee team worked with the public school, Escuela Rogelio Rosado Crespo in Yabucoa, to start a vegetable garden that’s now used to provide food for the school’s cafeteria.
This activity aligns with another aspect of Be a Bee’s vision to create relationships between public and private schools. The team is also building a rooftop garden at Saint John’s High School. This will be the first urban edible rooftop garden in Puerto Rico. And if Isabelle’s mother Roselly Ramseyer is any proof, parents will definitely be getting in on the action.
“Most farming is done in the countryside in Puerto Rico,” shares Roselly. “We’ve seen other cities build rooftop gardens, so the Whole Kids Foundation grant Isabell received is being used to build her school’s edible garden that will be educational, as well. The school will use the garden as an outdoor classroom, where kids can learn how to grow food. And because the school has a bee observatory the bees can pollinate the garden, showing the impact of bees in an urban area.”
‘A Different Kind’ Of Farming
On the west coast of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, Lisa Jander and her husband and cofounder, Kendall Lang, are developing Fusion Farms— a new hurricane-protected vertical farming model designed to cultivate food security, food sovereignty, and food safety for Puerto Rico. The farm’s main area, which makes up about 80-85% of the establishment, primarily runs on aquaponics, while its hydroponic microgreens use harvested rainwater.
For the last two years, Lisa and Kendall have kept sustainability at the fore of every aspect of their business, including the packaging and labels.
“Everything is food grade so that we can re-use it and wash with rainwater or turn it into something compostable,” shares Lisa. “Sustainability for us is really about overcoming all of the environmental factors that we have here—the tropical storms, Sahara dust, and earthquakes. We have all these things that can impact whether or not we succeed, but our model is such that this is sustainable. If there’s a hurricane here again like Maria, can containers ship food here? Maybe not for several weeks. The Fusion Farms model can be up and running locally, so that people can eat the day after a hurricane.”
Providing food for people through the farm’s produce isn’t the only way Lisa wants to help ensure people have food security. An educator and author, she’s gravitated to supporting young people throughout her entire career. When visiting the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, and speaking with the students interested in farming, she learned many of them aren’t able to find jobs, so they end up leaving the island. Puerto Rico has suffered extensively from brain drain. But if opportunities arise, staying power will persist.
“We started bringing on interns from the university to show them there’s a different kind of farming,” says Lisa. “Our vision is for the Fusion Farms model to spread across the island. There are hundreds of vacant, concrete buildings that could be used for aquaponics.”
A Life Project
Meanwhile in Dorado, Stephanie Monserrate is running Güakiá Colectivo Agroecológico, a collective of two men and women growing an agroecology farm, rooted in sustainable practices and promoting social equality.
Prompted by the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Gürakiá serves a low-income community that was heavily impacted by the natural disaster.
“I describe it as a life project,” says Stephanie. “Agroecology has such a social component, so we started presenting to communities. For us, it’s not only about sustaining the land, it’s sustaining ourselves as a collective because we’re not a machine. It’s about how we treat each other and how we manage our relationships with the community.
After visiting several farms in different parts of the world, including Costa Rica and Vermont to see how their agroecology systems work, Stephanie says she “fell a little bit more in love with how we do things in Puerto Rico.”
“Every land dictates something different,” says Stephanie. “Basically, that’s what agroecology is. We imitate the land we’re in, so we do a lot of work in the beginning. We don’t use pesticides. We try to use minimal harmful technology on the land because we’re trying to imitate what has already been there. So in our case in Dorado, we’re aiming to make a little food forest. We want to intervene as little as possible. Our farm is 11 acres. At the end of it there’s a rocky forest mountain, and little by little it’s capturing more of the farm. You would think you’d have to destroy all that. But what we think is, ‘there are more trees, so how do we integrate trees and food so they can work together, while honoring the land and ourselves, and making food available to the local community?’”
The Island Challenges & Community-Driven Solutions
Against these farming initiatives, a fair set of challenges are perpetuated by the government and priorities it has with the mainland. Once upon a time, Puerto Rico produced two-thirds of its food. Then came Operation Bootstrap, an industrialization policy that encouraged farmers to relocate to cities.
The Jones Act, a U.S. law that requires only U.S. ships to transport goods to Puerto Rico, hasn’t helped the situation for farms.
“Because of the Jones Act local farms don’t get contracts with supermarkets here,” says Stephanie. “So we have to do little boxes and get one another together—at least small farms do. In agroecology I grow a little bit of everything, so maybe I wouldn’t have the capacity to feed 300 to 500 families, and I don’t expect to be able to do that because it’s not sustainable.”
In addition not having access to potentially large contracts with supermarkets, Gürakiá does not currently get any percentage cuts with water.
‘We just need to organize and create a nucleus of little regions of farmers, and have food hubs and markets all over the island,” opines Stephanie. “Pre-covid, farmers markets were growing on the island, and people were asking for local produce. You won’t find a lot of local food in supermarkets in Puerto Rico. The small farms on the island also need to keep connecting with local restaurant owners.”
Roselly and Isabelle want to see more collaboration between public and private schools, as well as the creation of a farming alliance on the island.
Jey Ma’s biggest challenge is getting people to come work at Finca Pajuil. Being out in the countryside in Hatillo doesn’t always generate the most traffic.
Lisa hopes to share and exchange knowledge with young people aspiring to create livelihoods for themselves. More communication and connectivity across the island are imperative for this to happen.
All that being said, at the end of the day, farming calls for nurturing, understanding cycles and seasons, and innately wanting to give back to one’s community—qualities women possess by nature.
“When I was learning about farming all my role models were women,” reflects Stephanie. “It’s a good thing to be a woman in farming in Puerto Rico.”
As originally reported by: Forbes
