Meet Vanessa Forbes
Title: Horticulture Extension Agent
Affiliation: University of the Virgin Islands, Cooperative Extension Services
Interview Date: May 31, 2018
Interview Language: English
Spatial coverage: U.S. Virgin Islands
Topics Covered in this Interview:
– St. Croix, agriculture, farming
– water conservation, drip irrigation, cistern
– University of the Virgin Islands, cooperative extension service
Interview Highlights
On the experience of going through Hurricane Maria in 2017
I was on St. Croix, in our home with my husband and my two children. … My husband and I had situated a little bunker in the bathroom, the inner most room of the house, with quilts on the floor and sleeping bags, water, flashlights. … You hear people say, for a tornado, it sounds like a freight train. For Maria, it was somewhat very similar. However for certain parts of Maria, we could actually feel the house vibrate. The walls felt like they were shaking, the roof sounded like if it was being tugged from every direction. … We could see the door inhale and exhale like someone who’s having a difficult time getting oxygen in but it was literally the door was contorting and receding as the wind pushed and pulled at that door. And my husband said, “Vanessa find some wood.” And I ran all around the house collecting anything that could be nailed and drilled into that wall.
On the impact of Hurricane Maria on the landscape
It has completely changed. We normally had a vista. I remember, I’ve lived in that area for about 17, 18 years. And I always remember driving down to this overhanging canopy of trees. And now, it’s just like little to no trees in that area anymore, because they’re all gone. Trees that were huge and beautiful and majestic. Tamarind trees and kenep trees, all gone. So it’s a completely different neighborhood, it’s a lot hotter now.
On predicting hurricanes
I can remember I was really little for Hurricane Hugo [in 1989], and my grandmother and my grandfather would always watch the animals and the trees. And my grandmother would always say that when the rats, when they were moving in a funny way, or the birds were moving in a funny way, she would say, “We’re going to have bad weather.” And so said, so done, when Hurricane Hugo happened. …
My grandfather would … watch the avocado trees and the mango trees, and the different fruit trees … back before Hugo, we had an abundance of avocado and an amazing amount of mangoes. And it was just like a bumper crop of everything at once. And my grandfather said, “We’re gonna have a bad hurricane.” And Hugo came. And apparently, the same thing happened for Maria. … The weeks before, or the months before Maria and Irma came in, we had mangoes. Oh my god, we were giving away mangoes. We had so much mangoes around the island, we couldn’t sell the mangoes, it was just like, everybody was putting boxes of mangoes by their gates, “Take, free mangoes.” The same was for avocados, the same for almost every fruit that came in. Fruits that normally wouldn’t come in at that season came in. And we knew that was a sign that there was going to be a bad hurricane.
On the impacts of the 2015 drought on farmers
It. Was. Scary. It was hard. And it is still something that we’re getting over. … We had farmers that had to put down animals. We had animals that were emaciated. They were extremely thin, due to the fact that there was not enough forage for them. We had farmers that were crying out for ways to be able to get water. …
The Department of Agriculture had to figure out ways to get a lot more hay. … The farmers had to use a lot more molasses to add to the hay as an additional nutrition source for the animals. Farmers needed to become a lot more resourceful and work with one another in order to get food and feed for their animals. … A few farmers, started to reach out to the schools in order to get cafeteria scraps or like, kitchen scraps for the pigs and things like that, which I’m sure saved a lot of the, the pig farmers’ stock.
On recovery from the 2015 drought
Recovery is slow. … And we actually had to make a decision in 2015, what plants to allow to die and what plants to keep. … And the trees actually, before the drought, were covered with blossoms, and then it’s just, they just dropped, like 90 percent of them. And this was to be expected. …
Drought is front and foremost in my head nowadays. And when I go out to teach the farmers, or to teach the students in the schools, or to teach the homeowners, I always try to teach them to remember that drought … has always been a part of us, but we seemed to [have] forgotten it, and now that it’s slapping us back into a realization that it’s still here and we need to remember it. It’s now, first and foremost, in my mind to keep teaching them ways to, again, conserve water. Be mindful of the fact that drought is not only just from the lack of rain, but it’s this high amount of wind that we’re getting that’s drying out the atmospheric moisture.
On which extreme weather events are most concerning
The droughts, because … in the Virgin Islands, we import 98 percent of our food. And a lot of people are trying to grow some portion of their food now, which is why I started farming a little bit more, and trying to know where my food comes from and what’s in my food. And if the drought continues to get stronger and stronger, it will mean we have less and less water, and more and more people sucking water from the aquifers to their wells or applying for more wells to suck more water from the aquifers. So the drought scares me tremendously, because then I’m gonna see huge trees that should be able to reach deep waters, fall over like they did in 2015.
On the importance of water conservation on an island
Being that we are in an island situation, wells are a good source of water. But if you continually take water without allowing for the … aquifers to revitalize themselves through rains being filtered down through the roots … we will not have good sources of freshwater. We will have saltwater inclusion in our aquifers, and that means our land will be poisoned and we won’t be able to grow our own fruits. So, takeaway is, if you’re going to drill a well, monitor how much water you take. [Just] because you have a well does not mean you have an unlimited source of water.