Mandeville, Manchester — A lay preacher, farmer Lester Murray is also an authority on the Bible.

Among his favourite stories is that of Joseph, a Hebrew man who, according to the Old Testament Biblical account, worked himself into top position in the agricultural department of government in ancient Egypt.

Murray says his approach to farming at Adam’s Valley, more than 2,500 feet above sea level in Maidstone, north-west Manchester is heavily based on Joseph’s strategy of careful, long-term planning with due regard to every contingency.

“Joseph didn’t have a willy-nilly approach to agriculture,” Murray told a rapt audience at a liquid fertiliser promotional event hosted at his farm by fertiliser manufacturers and distributors, Newport-Fersan.

Instead, said Murray, Joseph approached agriculture in a timely fashion, using storage facilities and distribution centres, making the necessary linkages “from production to the final consumer”. It was an approach, he suggested, which should be adapted by the Jamaican Government, represented on the day by minister without portfolio JC Hutchinson. The latter is himself an assertive advocate of self-sustaining and value-added agriculture: “Grow what we eat, eat what we can and can what we can’t”.

In telling his story in mid-April, Murray, a trained agriculturalist and award-winning farmer, briefly recalled how his first venture into coffee farming, 20 years ago, failed.

“We are in north-west Manchester along the mountain range known as Don Figueroa. That’s about 2,500 to 2,700 feet above sea level. It’s a good place to plant coffee and 20 years ago coffee was booming,” said Murray.

However, shortly after he and his brother put sixty acres of their 70-acre farm under coffee production, “the bottom of coffee fell out”. The financial crisis of the time made the situation worse.

“But,” said Murray, “a true farmer is a hard man fi dead — yu pick im up, yu lick im down, im bounce right back.”

With his back to the wall, Murray adjusted as he believes his hero, Joseph, would have.

Murray said he looked around him and realised that the locals used diversified agriculture, and that his initial mistake was to depend on a single crop. God’s message to him, he said, was to “use what you have…”

“And so we begin to diversify; when you go to Rome you do as the Romans do,” he said.

He diversified by planting Irish potato, sweet potato, carrots, peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, among other traditional domestic crops, using a mix of open field and protected (greenhouse) methods.

“Today I can stand before you with a wealth of experience and advise you that if you plan to go into farming, don’t put your business into one basket. Don’t even allow any single crop to be more than 30 per cent of what you do… you must spread that risk, for farming is risky business. I hasten to say while farming is risky business, farming is very essential business. At Adams Valley Farm we say food is power,” he said.

In time he realised that the high altitude gave the Adam’s Valley Farm unique comparative advantage in terms of crops not regularly grown in Jamaica. One such was strawberry.

“This location is ideal for growing strawberries… not many farmers [in Jamaica] can grow it because they don’t have the natural condition,” he said.

Murray started a strawberry project three years ago, with a single plant, doing experimenting and propagating in a small, protected space.

By April he had in excess of 6,000 strawberry plants and entered the commercial phase supplying north coast hotels. He said he had received “excellent feedback” from customers.

He told how when his distributor took samples to hotels, potential buyers said “no man, you lying man, this not grown in Jamaica”. The distributor “had to take pictures to them (hoteliers) and they had to come and look for themselves,” Murray said.

“They (hoteliers) are saying this is what they want,” said Murray. “Imported stawberries accounts in the high nineties, percentage-wise, of strawberries consumed in Jamaica. Our [Adam’s Valley] strawberries are fresher and shelf life is much longer. Couple weeks ago they said ‘can I double supply?’ I said give me three months, and so I started now to meet that market. I believe that production must be demand-driven; I have no single crop here that I don’t know where it will be sold. I have a fair idea where it is going. Just like in Joseph’s time, production must be demand-driven,” said Murray.

Like farmers elsewhere in Jamaica, the challenge of a consistent supply of water to support his crops arose. Murray ‘s response was to do as he believes Joseph would have done: to use what he has available to him, rain-water harvesting, allowing the steeply sloping terrain at the farm to work to his advantage.

According to Murray, the rationale was simple: “Historical data of rainfall in Jamaica tell us that Jamaica gets an average of 60 inches of rainfall each year. The hilly interior [such as Maidstone] gets much of that rain. One inch of rainfall on one acre of land represents 26,000 gallons of water. If we get 60 inches of rain in any particular year, [that equates to] 1.5 million gallons per acre, per year.”

Murray now has three acres dedicated to rainwater harvesting using run-off from greenhouses, other structures and hillsides, to ponds below. He boasted that for one week in April, the farm collected at least “half a million gallons of rainwater”.

The strategy has been so effective that the farm was able to have water through the severe droughts of 2014-15.

Using what’s available has also meant reliance on solar and wind energy.

“We use our panels and our windmills to create electricity to bring water from the lowest point, up slope, to be gravity fed down…” he said.

His knowledge of agricultural science has also allowed him to deal with soil contamination using “sterilisation” methods. Murray is also using waste water to develop “fertigation”, which is a way of providing soil nutrients through irrigation water.

“I am supplying black mint using waste water,” he told his listeners.

Murray said that at Adam’s Valley Farm, his approach is to be always flexible, as “nothing is cast in stone and we are always seeking a better way to get things done”.

The ambition is to show the way to community and country, just as his Old Testament hero, Joseph, would have done.

“We believe to be a First World Farm we must do it with First World thinking. Find a way to get there first. Our mission then is to set up a model farm, a microcosm of what can make Jamaica great,” he said.