By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

GRAND BAHAMA ISLAND — There’s too much salt on the tomatoes at Grand Bahama Farm. It’s on the cabbages and onions, too.

The salt is from the saltwater that twice flooded the 3,000-acre farm, said farm manager Gerald Wathen.

“The first time was in ’99 with Hurricane Floyd, then again in ’04 by hurricanes Francis and Jean,” he said.

Grand Bahama Farm is owned by Minas Vardoulis, who came to the Bahamas from Greece 30 years ago and started a small egg farm.
That has expanded to Grand Bahama Food Co., which markets the vegetables; Bahamas Poultry, which produces broilers; and Sunshine Farms, producing about 2,000 cases, 30 dozen eggs each, every week.

Grand Bahama Farm’s flooding problem could be resolved if normal amounts of rain would fall and wash the salt away. But for the past 6-7 years, annual rainfall has been about 40 inches a year instead of the typical 60 inches.

“When it rains, it will rain an inch, but it is so hot that most of it just evaporates,” said Wathen, who is from Michigan.
“Consequently with the saltwater floods, you get all the salt in the ground. We didn’t have much rain, so we’ve still got high salt content.

“Now, without the rain, we’re starting to get high salt in the groundwater because the ocean is about a mile away. It’s been difficult, to say the least.”

Besides the flooding, the hurricanes destroyed 650 acres of citrus trees and 600 acres of bananas. Wathen called it a “financial shock.”

“The only thing we’re doing now is vegetables,” he said. “We grow about seven months of the year, harvesting from November first until June first. We start in August. We grow all of our plants from seed. We plant for 25-26 weeks in a row, so much product each week of each item.”

The farm keeps a continuous flow to supermarkets and restaurants. It plants according to the market.

“Certain times of the year, we know that market will be higher in the (United) States, so we’ll load it in containers and ship it to Miami,” Wathen said.

Ninety percent of the food is imported on Grand Bahama Island, which is 50 miles east of Florida, with a population of 300,000. The government places restrictions on imports during growing season to any of the Bahamian islands.

Growing vegetables is labor-intensive and that’s 50 percent of the cost, Wathen said. Some workers are Bahamian, but most are Haitian. Wages are $5-$6 an hour, although piece-rates of $12-$14 an hour are often paid.

“You look at that as a lot of money, but it’s not because you’re getting production – it’s better on piece-rate,” Wathen said.

It also takes a lot of money to get land into production and to keep it there. Wathen compared the soil to a gravel driveway. It takes 1,600-1,800 pounds of fertilizer an acre just to get started.
The first couple of years a field is farmed, it needs 500-600 pounds of triple-super phosphate because the ground doesn’t have any phosphate. Crops are side dressed with drip irrigation.

“There are no nutrients in the ground. It has a pH factor of 8.5, 8.7. You have to feed the plants. You have to put all the food there, because there’s nothing here,” Wathen said.

There are also no implement dealers on the island, so things get difficult when a tractor breaks down. They use John Deere equipment. “We keep an inventory of parts, but still, if you need a part you have to wait three or four days, and that’s hard to get used to,” Wathen said.

Yet, he is content on the island, for now. It’s “been an experience,” he said.

Now if someone could just do a rain dance …