THE success of the country’s agro-parks are being attributed to the intervention of the National Irrigation Commission (NIC). According to NIC Managing Director Mark Richards, the fact that parks are located in irrigated zones has proved advantageous for farmers.

“New Forest/Duff House is a shining example of how we had to craft our way of getting them (farmers) to understand that the business is their own, and how they use the resource is a part of their management strategy.

And so, being a very productive area now is a result of the interventions that we have used while developing the system,” Richards told the Jamaica Observer. The NIC, Richards said, has targeted nine agro-parks for design, installation, and subsequently management of the main irrigation systems.

“The majority of those agro-parks that we’ve seen advertised and we’ve heard of are really in irrigated zones, where it was the engineering team over the time that led a lot of the work to do the designs and supervise the instillation,” Milton Henry, the NIC’s director of engineering and technical services, said.

The New Forest/Duff House park, one of the eight parks implemented under the agriculture ministry’s programme and a benefactor of the NIC irrigation scheme, is reported to be actively producing condiments and vegetables, including tomatoes, lettuce, escallion, thyme, pak choi, broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, sweet potatoes, and beet root, among other crops.

The NIC executives said without an irrigation scheme, the productivity of a farmer is more difficult to achieve.

“The drought is ongoing and we’ve seen an increase in agricultural productivity in the last quarter, and the ministry has highlighted that a significant amount of the productivity has been in these irrigated districts. So a new forest at PGR (Plantain Garden River), Yallahs has continued to drive the productivity and the recovery of agriculture from the drought,” Richards stated. The New Forest Agro Park is one of the four projects funded by the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) in 2005 and involved 21.8 km of irrigation network.

The scheme has two pump houses with variable speed drives: underground and above-ground pressurised pipe network including water meters and valves. Data provided to the Observer show that the scheme covers 398 hectares of land and is expected to benefit close to 500 farmers. Since the 2013/2014 fiscal year, the industry has seen an increase in customers from 269 to 318 for this fiscal year.

The number of active acreage over the same period has increased by 94; from 698 in 2013/2014 to 792 in 2014/2015. “We are expecting the agro-parks to be developing more. We have set up an agro-parks steering committee.

As to how we’ll communicate between us and the new customers coming in these regions, the door is open and the dialogue continues with them, because it’s a matter of training and bringing up the understanding of what the new needs are to have a sustainable irrigation system into the era of climate change, and into the era of IMF management of government resources,” Richards stated.

“As we bring on new customers in our agro-parks, the tariff structure is changing [and] a number of people are also concerned about the cost and the implication that it will have on their business. What we are doing, as we’ve said before, is the training.

We have an internal on-farm water management unit that actually just travels out and trains farmers in how to manage their on-farm irrigation to minimise the use of water on their farms,” he explained.

The NIC has also seen a $14.2-million increase in water sales to the agroparks since implantation in 2013.