Silk Grass Farms – Using Regenerative Farming to Complement Nature
Regenerative farming – it’s the alternative method of farming to the conventional type of farming like what most of us are accustomed to. Regenerative farming is defined as carbon farming, which transforms greenhouse gasses into beneficial carbon and stores it in the soil, also known as carbon sequestration. The University of Washington reported on February 24, 2022 in their online U.W. News bulletin that a study found that the food grown under regenerative practices contained more magnesium, calcium, potassium and zinc; as well as more vitamins and more phyto-chemicals. These are compounds not typically tracked for food but have been shown to reduce inflammation were also lower in elements that are detrimental to human health. This is the type of farming that the co-owners of Silk Grass Farms say they engage in to produce the crops. The co-owners, Mandy Cabot and her husband, Peter Kjellerup, and former government minister and C.E.O. of C.P.B.L., Doctor Henry Canton invested around a hundred and twenty million U.S dollars to purchase the tract of land and build the factory where the company sits. On Tuesday, they invited the media for a tour of the farm and factory and you saw the new line of bottled natural juices that they produce, along with coconut water. Tonight, News Five’s Marion Ali brings you part two of that story, which features the farm.
Marion Ali, Reporting
This is a portion of Silk Grass Farms in Stann Creek. The property measures twenty-seven thousand, five hundred acres, the majority of which lies in the Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve. The co-owners decided to use only a fraction of the expanse of land, about ten percent or about three thousand acres, for their business venture, just as the land’s previous owner had done. But they discovered that that portion was previously cultivated for commercial agriculture using conventional farming methods. That eroded the topsoil, which the new owners restored. Interestingly, Dr. Henry Canton said the type of farming that previously damaged the soil was the same type of farming that he had engaged in for decades before.
Henry Canton
Dr. Henry Canton, Executive Director, Silk Grass Farms
“I must admit that my first 36 years before I came here was all conventional farming. In fact, I was a big part of all the things that today I consider wrong. I was the leader in implementing a lot of that stuff.”
Mandy Cabot
Mandy Cabot, Co-owner, Silk Grass Farms
“Our model is all about “of Belize, by Belize and for Belize” It’s a circular economic model that means don’t take from the soil, put back into the soil, use regenerative, renewable energy sources, put back where you can and lay the groundwork for future generations. The farmland, the regenerative work that we’re doing on that farmland, this factory and all of the bells and whistles we have in it are to give kind of a, a launching pad for this enterprise to be profitable and resilient in the long term. So that we can support the 24, 000 acres of rainforest that we have taken under our wing, that we have said we’re going to protect in perpetuity.”
The farming activity is spread out. In one section the women employees tend to legumes, dragon fruit, gumbo limbo, pigeon peas, fever grass, a vanilla nursery, and other crops that could also be converted into value-added products. And while some people might flinch at the sight of worms, these insects play an important role in the type of farming that is applied at Silk Grass Farms.
A few minutes’ away is the coconut harvesting facility. Here is where coconuts are husked, shelled and the water is extracted to be processed and bottled and then sent for cold-compressed processing into the Silk Grass Farms coconut oil you’re familiar with. But Cabot says other parts of the coconut can also be used after it is harvested.
Mandy Cabot
“The coconut water is actually from younger coconuts. If we let the green, younger coconuts mature, it is from those coconuts that we take the meat and process oil and milk and creates other things. We haven’t solved every bit of waste yet, but on the brown nuts, the husks that you see on the outside, if chopped up, they can be bricked and used as planting material – mulch. We use it, you can see it in the shade house where the vanilla orchids were planted. It can be bricked and sold to nurseries and garden supply stores. It’s quite a big business in other parts of this hemisphere. The coconut shells can be pyrolyzed, which is a fancy way of saying burned without oxygen into a charcoal material that is oh, by the way, a perfect soil amendment.”
Further away, the farm has several ponds and a mini dam to control the flow and use of water in the dry season
Dr. Henry Canton
“We went after water very aggressively, storing it where we needed to store it, slow it down where we needed to slow it down, and as you saw, there was a lot of ponds and stuff like that around because we believed that if we had a lot of water stored back and that everything wasn’t just rushing out to the streams and the river, that we’d be able to sustain our dry weathers a little longer. The concept was also to irrigate from those ponds at that time. But what we’ve now found out is that the ponds will not handle the dry weather and irrigation, so we’re going to have to look at probably a different way of irrigating.”
The farm is utilized in such a way, the co-owners say, that complements nature, and that also includes the way carbon is stored.
Dr. Henry Canton
“What, wet areas that we can’t drain, we’re going to put bamboo. And so there’s a lot of different concepts that we’re going to use in order for us to, uh, Uh, add value back or regenerate the soils as we see it, because we really do believe that a healthy soil will give us a healthy crop.”
As the farm diversifies in the type of juices it markets, it also looks for ways in which it can utilize everything in the most environmentally-friendly manner. Thus, in a few months, they will add another component to their facilities. And its purpose is no doubt good news to environmentalists.
Mandy Cabot
“A building that you all haven’t seen is going to be going up in the next three months. That’s our bio-refinery. They expect to be able to put through a ton and a half to two tons of bio waste an hour round the clock. And that bio waste could be coconut shells, coconut husks, could be citrus peel, could be avocado pits. It could be a number of things, wood chips from the farm or trees that were taken down or deadfall, put them in this bio refinery which is like a giant furnace and out comes this carbon black material that is used as a soil amendment. When you bury it in the ground, you’re actually sequestering carbon.”
Marion Ali for News Five.
