We are Just harvesting & Drying this years Regenerative Climate Smart Onions. they are proving to be our best quality onions thus far. They are sizable and extremely firm. We will have them available at the Farm Up Jamaica Food & Farm Store and also through our partners island wide.
It’s 2013 I was on a call with a cousin who runs a shop in the country area of St. Catherine Jamaica. He dropped his phone in the middle of our conversation and when he picked it up, he said he was in the middle of cutting an onion in half to sell to a customer.
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Surprised, I asked him why would you sell a half of an onion? He said onions were so expensive that people were buying half and quarters of onions, just enough to cook their pot.
We started investigating and found out that onions were not growing well in the fields of Jamaica because of a pest called the Beet Army Worm. The pest was destroying the local, Jamaican, farmers’ crops and the chemicals being used to combat the pest had stopped working because the pest had become immune to the pesticide.
Farm Up Jamaica shared their interest in wanting to help farmers to grow onions organically. The Ministry of Agriculture responded and directed us to a farming community in South Manchester. We assisted farmers and created a test farm to research and figure out how we could grow onions without using the harsh chemical pesticides, which were not proving effective and definitely not as healthy as organic onions would be.
In the first season, we planted an acre and lost 75% of the crop to the Beet Army Worm. We started training Student Farmers from the Heart Trust Institute in Clarendon. We would give them challenges to create botanical pesticides to combat the beat army worm. One day while trialing the different mixtures, Eureka! We got it! We found away to get rid of the beat army worm without harsh Chemicals. Our second crop yielded 18,000 pounds of onions to the acre and the rest is history!
