Support Farmers Uplift Community Highlight Culture

• Provide skills training and mentoring

• Advocate for farming subsidy policies

• Connect farmers with existing government opportunities

• Fund with USDA grants for cooperatives, for production, and for innovation

• Increase SNAP accessibility for locally produced food

• Upscale waste management methods

• Scale cooperative farming across the island

• Create and direct a 2% tax on imported foods to a fund for local agriculture

• Celebrate culturally relevant foods

• Partner with local distilleries

• Grow food economy through tourism

• Leverage support through a “Grown in VI” food label

Strategies for Scaling Up

Ultimately, this pilot aims to address a portion of St. Croix’s need for accessible, affordable, and locally grown food. Its proximity to Frederiksted is intentional in fulfilling this purpose. Allowing people in Frederiksted to purchase produce grown on site with SNAP can improve local access to affordable and healthy produce. Frederiksted being home to the island’s only cruise ship port offers an opportunity to direct dollars from cruise goers into the local food economy that would otherwise be spent on imported foods while honoring local producers and culture. This relationship could also benefit the cruise industry by opening access to cultural food tours and cooking classes for tourists. Finally, on-site food production and processing provides an opportunity to partner with local restaurants and distilleries to supply produce.

Establishing and growing a farm is a difficult task. This pilot project envisions one way to do that on one site near one city. For agriculture to grow as a viable and thriving industry in St. Croix, the above strategies are recommended. These strategies fall into three categories. These are: supporting farmers, uplifting community, and highlighting culture. They draw from three existing plans as well as from the project team’s experience visiting and researching

Strategy

St. Croix. The plans in question are the U.S. Virgin Islands Vision 2040, the Virgin Islands Agricultural Plan from 2021, and the Virgin Islands Community Food Systems Snapshot from 2019. The implementation matrix above outlines how project elements and strategies might be phased and implemented.

A central component of this project is the cooperative nature of the proposed programming. With the knowledge that a co-op approach has failed in the past, many of the following upscaling strategies call for investing in cross-collaboration and facilitating the accessibility of resources that can attract new local workers to the industry.

Conclusion

While the scope of this project is specific to its site and relationship to Frederiksted, it is important to note a significant limitation to developing agricultural on St. Croix. The average age of farmers on the island is 65 years old. This reveals an engagement gap. Youth and early career adults are not entering the farming industry at a rate that can sustain it. As mentioned before, the island’s agricultural history is intertwined with its complex colonial history. Because of the labor-intensive nature of farming and its association to slavery, there is significant and understandable cultural disinterest in engaging with the practice. Therefore, reframing agriculture from a slavery era practice to an avenue for selfsufficiency is an essential part of claiming the robust resources on the island in a way that increases local resilience. This stigma also begins to speak to why agricultural land is so underutilized on the island. These considerations must be addressed through not only the introduction of new agricultural opportunities, but through a deep and locally led process of community engagement and listening. Only then can access to novel resources and outcomes that can deliver the highest community benefit become a reality.

The current food system in St. Croix is one that is intersectional. It draws from and impacts economic, social, and environmental structures. Because of the wide disparities between socially vulnerable and extremely wealthy communities on the island, it is important to acknowledge that these disparities impact people differently across the food system. When thinking about strategies that build upon the current food system, it is important to envision a new paradigm that is intersectional and resilient in the face of a rapidly changing climate and growing wealth inequality.

This cooperative farming pilot is meant to highlight the key things that make St. Croix resilient and vibrant. It is meant to offer a way to claim the existing conditions on the island in a way that uplifts and increases selfsufficiency. While this proposal is not an all-encompassing solution, it begins to imagine ways to accomplish these goals and connect the resources on the island with feasible solutions that make agriculture on St. Croix a potential option for increasing Crucian’s self-sufficiency and resilience.