Pe­ter Christo­pher

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

* To­ba­go grown straw­ber­ries to hit lo­cal shelves by Oc­to­ber

* It is ex­pect­ed to both save and earn for­eign ex­change

* Four green­hous­es be­ing set up on Cove In­dus­tri­al Es­tate

De­spite some teething chal­lenges in set­ting up their in­fra­struc­ture, Berrycove is con­fi­dent that by the last quar­ter of 2022, straw­ber­ries and oth­er crops pre­vi­ous­ly not na­tive this coun­try will be grown in To­ba­go.

The com­pa­ny first an­nounced the plan to grow the fruit al­most ex­act­ly a year ago af­ter Berrycove was formed fol­low­ing a joint ven­ture be­tween An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Ltd, Is­land Grow­ers Caribbean and Alqui­mi Re­new­ables LLC.

Ralph Birk­hoff, co-founder and chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer of Is­land Grow­ers Caribbean and act­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er at Berrycove, ex­plained there were some chal­lenges ini­tial­ly with Town and Coun­try plan­ning of­fi­cials due to their un­fa­mil­iar­i­ty with the tech­nol­o­gy be­ing brought in by the com­pa­ny.

“Cer­tain de­sign el­e­ments for the foun­da­tion sys­tem, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the civ­il works took quite a while to get through. Be­cause of this type of build­ing tech­nol­o­gy, it’s very dif­fer­ent and they’ve nev­er seen it be­fore. So there’s a bit of, you know, an ed­u­ca­tion phase that we had to go through, and even­tu­al­ly that worked out fine,” said Birk­hoff.

The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly set­ting up four green­hous­es, of which two will be ded­i­cat­ed to grow­ing straw­ber­ries, while the oth­ers seek to grow crops pre­vi­ous­ly for­eign to this na­tion.

“Each one of them is ded­i­cat­ed to a spe­cif­ic crop mix, us­ing some sum­mer us­ing dif­fer­ent types of hy­dro­pon­ic sys­tems, every­thing is hy­dro­pon­ic, but we are in­tro­duc­ing oth­er types of im­port­ed green prod­ucts and we’re al­so adding new crops that have nev­er been sold in Trinidad be­fore. So we’re re­al­ly di­ver­si­fy­ing the se­lec­tion of let­tuce types we’re do­ing quite a bit of mi­cro­greens. We have ob­vi­ous­ly two of the hous­es are ded­i­cat­ed to straw­ber­ries and one to cane berries, black­ber­ries and rasp­ber­ries,” he said.

A few par­tic­u­lar­ly wet months al­so set back progress a bit, as the con­struc­tion at the site had to be halt­ed.

“We had ba­si­cal­ly the wettest June on record here which re­al­ly slowed our con­struc­tion down be­cause at that point we were still build­ing the foun­da­tion, so May June were very wet and it re­al­ly slowed us down you know, the con­trac­tor ba­si­cal­ly couldn’t op­er­ate on the site,” said Birk­hoff.

How­ev­er since then, sig­nif­i­cant progress has been made.

“The build­ings have all been erect­ed now and we’re cur­rent­ly in­stalling the green­house mem­branes and fin­ish­ing up the sys­tem. Since June 22, when they start­ed we’ve been go­ing at it pret­ty hard and we’re al­most com­plet­ed 45,000 square feet in to­tal. And they should be fin­ished by the end of this month,” he said.

Birk­hoff ex­plained that while the com­pa­ny had a con­tract with WASA, it has im­ple­ment­ed a rain­wa­ter col­lec­tion sys­tem as it was more ben­e­fi­cial to the growth of the crops.

“We are con­nect­ed to WASA but we can’t re­al­ly use that wa­ter. There’s too much chem­i­cal make­up in the wa­ter, the mu­nic­i­pal wa­ter in Trinidad, and it would ac­tu­al­ly kill our plants, to be hon­est with you. So we had to de­vel­op and at great ex­pense a rain­wa­ter catch­ment and stor­age and re­cir­cu­la­tion sys­tem so that we can at least di­lute the wa­ter from the mu­nic­i­pal sup­ply be­cause there’s lit­er­al­ly too many com­pounds in the wa­ter,” he ex­plained.

The rain­wa­ter sys­tem may present its own chal­lenges, giv­en the sea­son­al na­ture of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s weath­er, but Birk­hoff was con­fi­dent that Berrycove had put to­geth­er a prop­er plan to cope.

“It’s ei­ther not enough wa­ter or too much wa­ter, right. So wa­ter is al­ways a very crit­i­cal re­source and our sys­tem is ex­treme­ly ef­fi­cient in the use of wa­ter. We re­cy­cle and reuse wa­ter. We col­lect rain­wa­ter and our over­all pro­duc­tion sys­tem is al­so very en­er­gy ef­fi­cient, be­cause again as elec­tric­i­ty costs. are very high in the oth­er is­lands, there atro­cious­ly high, so, you know we’ve put to­geth­er more of a re­al sort of cli­mate-smart pro­duc­tion sys­tem and adapt­ed it to the dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ments where the farms are lo­cat­ed. And you know, you’ll see the farm in To­ba­go de­signed ac­cord­ing­ly with all of the dif­fer­ent me­chan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal and wa­ter sup­ply sys­tems that are re­al­ly state of the art,” he said.

But with these chal­lenges aside, the com­pa­ny is hope­ful it is on the home stretch with re­gard to pro­duc­tion.

Birk­hoff said based on the cur­rent sta­tus of the green­house de­vel­op­ment, Berrycove’s stock could be on shelves by Oc­to­ber.

“At this point, the project, we will we ex­pect to be fin­ished con­struc­tion, and in­stal­la­tion and test­ing of all of our sys­tem by ear­ly Sep­tem­ber. We hope to then have every­body trained up and ready to go ready to plant. We will have our first green crops out ear­ly. So we’re hop­ing by sort of the sec­ond third week of Sep­tem­ber we’ll have first crops avail­able and the straw­ber­ries take a lit­tle longer to har­vest. So those will be ready some­time prob­a­bly in ear­ly Oc­to­ber,” said Birk­hoff.

The com­pa­ny has al­ready start­ed a re­cruit­ment push and has be­gun to es­tab­lish its on­line pres­ence which will fea­ture e-com­merce op­tions. The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly search­ing for about 25 work­ers, with an em­pha­sis on those with a farm­ing back­ground. But Berrycove has al­so been tasked with train­ing prospec­tive farm­ers as part of an agree­ment with the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies.

“Our com­pa­nies signed an MOU with the Uni­ver­si­ty of West In­dies and its Fac­ul­ty of Agri­cul­ture and that kind of a mul­ti-lay­ered MOU that in­volves tech­nol­o­gy, tech­ni­cal ex­change and as well as po­ten­tial­ly a re­cruit­ing plat­form for us. So, they’ve pro­vid­ed us with a data­base of their alum­ni for over the last 10 years and we’re hop­ing that some of them are work­ing in these types of fa­cil­i­ties over­seas in the UK or Cana­da or the US and are in­ter­est­ed in com­ing back home and work­ing for us,” he said.

Birk­hoff was hope­ful that the progress made with this farm would be­gin to sew the much-need­ed seeds for im­port sub­sti­tu­tion not just in Trinidad and To­ba­go but across the Caribbean. This he said was cru­cial es­pe­cial­ly af­ter the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic brought greater at­ten­tion to a prob­lem that had been long swept un­der the rug.

“But let’s be hon­est, this prob­lem ex­ist­ed long be­fore COVID . It is the prob­lem in the Caribbean of food im­port de­pen­den­cy that has ex­ist­ed for decades,” he said.

Birk­hoff added, “It’s now come to a head, it’s now come to a point where they re­alise that we or any one of these is­lands could be­come an­oth­er Sri Lan­ka. You know where we have a Forex strain, we can­not get the food that we once were able to or­der from the whole­salers out of the US, you know, there are re­stric­tions hap­pen­ing there too. They’re not go­ing to be able to sell as much food to the Caribbean as we were used to. Be­cause they have their own food pro­duc­tion prob­lems.”

As a re­sult Birk­hoff again hailed the fore­sight of the team at An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Ltd, as he be­lieved their in­vest­ment could go be­yond sim­ple prof­its for their com­pa­ny.

‘These peo­ple are do­ing some­thing very, very good for Trinidad, not just in terms of pro­duc­ing food, but cre­at­ing a new in­dus­try be­cause when we start ex­pand­ing this farm and grow­ing four or five mil­lion pounds of straw­ber­ries and freez­ing them and ex­port­ing them, you know, that’s a di­rect for­eign ex­change op­por­tu­ni­ty for the coun­try. And our strat­e­gy go­ing for­ward is to ex­pand in many oth­er is­lands and do the same there,” Birk­hoff said.