People have whether consciously or subconsciously, have recognized that
It’s a beautiful thing to just get up, and go outside, and get your hands dirty,
know that you are gonna be able to eat what you are planting.
I feel like my responsibility here is to bring this farm back to life with all of its natural fertility,
and its natural fruitfulness that it has.
So the goal, yes, it is to restore it. To take care of it.
To baby it back to life.
The more love, and time, and care, and protection that you give your piece of land,
your Earth, she will return that back to you.
But farms’ vulnerability to the effects of climate change was exposed during Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
My husband and my daughters, we were in Florida when Hurricane Irma
was heading in that direction.
A week later, Maria came.
There was a crisis, the ports closed down.
And we were watching it from over there in Florida, the grocery store shelves were empty.
And we’re like, what is going on?
[Producer] That’s because Hurricanes Irma and Maria left the agricultural industry nearly destroyed.
[Cabán Álvarez] Drew and I, we just kinda look at each other and we’re like, let’s move to Puerto Rico.
We just knew, especially after watching the news and everything that was going on
that this is where we needed to be.
We felt even more connected to our island than ever before.
And we wanted to be here with our family, with our friends, with our people.
Why do they call it a starfruit?
Because it’s a star
It’s a star.
[Lemoine] I was not prepared for this work here.
This is a city boy you talking to. I’m from the projects.
You don’t have no greens, no greenery in the projects other than other green stuff.
Once you put your heart and your dedication and something bigger than yourself into what you do,
your body will transform and do what it needs to do for your family, for your country, for your people.
[Cabán Álvarez] I dreamed about having our little corner of the island
being a food source for people here in our community.
[Producer] But Shirley knows that in order to achieve this goal, her farm needs to be able to survive
future threats caused by climate change.
[Cabán Álvarez] The ecological approach to agriculture and to farming is very important to me
because we are living in times where there is a huge concern, and rightfully so, over how our Earth
is going through these changes.
One of the things that’s really, really important
for us is to not have to use weed killer.
I would say that 75 to 80 percent, and that number fluctuates, but 75-80 percent of our time on the farm
is maintaining the weeds, the weed control.
Now, what other farmers might do is to spray you know, some weed killer.
In an agroecological farm, that’s actually something we don’t do. We don’t wanna do that because
we don’t want to contaminate the soil, we don’t want to affect the pollinators,
we don’t want to affect the groundwater. So it’s very labor intensive, like,
I go up there and I have to maintain the plantains or where my crops are going to be
and it’s by hand, cleaning.
And what would maybe take a day in a conventional farm, has taken us almost two weeks.
Once these plantains start producing, voy a entre sacar, I’m gonna take out a few,
and everything that is gonna be planted from here on out,
A lot of water comes down when it rains, so much. At the bottom it looks like a river.
Like, after Maria, we saw so many landslides, and it’s not just a hurricane that can affect the land,
but with erosion a lot of the nutrients get washed out.
So when you plant al contorno, following the natural curves and the layout of the land,
you lose a lot less nutrients.
Working with what the land gives you, is what I have learned to be the key component of more sustainable farming
and ecological farming. Working with what you have.
We’re like returning to these practices that used to be made in the past
and got lost for some reason.
Sometimes I say, we humans get a bit lost in the way.
A day that it’s raining, and you look and follow all the water running through the ditches,
it was perfect. It was so planned, so well planned.
[Producer] Agroecological farmers in Puerto Rico like Marisol and Ian saw similar results.
[Villabolos] Something that we learned from Hurricane Maria is that if we prune them,
the tree can withstand all these winds. So we can have the breadfruit trees saved from the winds.
And then they will recuperate pretty well.
[Producer] Puerto Rico’s agricultural obstacles are not new.
It has historically struggled against the colonial policies imposed by Spain and the United States.
I feel like there have been chains that we didn’t know were there until we started moving.
I believe that the people, I believe that we have the power to bring forth a change,
a positive change for our island.
I have the blessing and the opporunity of growing food not only for myself, but for my community as well.
An island, a country, that produces its own food can open up these doors to a new kind of freedom.